Caretta Caretta By Paulus Hochgatterer

Over the past 100 years the novel of adolescence has become a familiar staple, depicting sensitive and innocent youth as the victims of a brutal and unfeeling society. Unlike their predecessors, however, today’s youth are plagued by more complex challenges – not simply having to deal with puberty, the demands of society, as well as their own attempts at individuation through rebellion or withdrawal, but, more significantly, with fractured families, with drugs and promiscuous sex, and with the omnipresent distractions of a materialistic society. Again unlike their literary predecessors, today’s teenagers are often clever and resourceful, inventive, resilient, self-sufficient to a great degree, and thus do not allow themselves to become victims of society, of their peers, or of their families.

Paulus Hochgatterer’s Caretta Caretta (1999) features a 15-year-old juvenile delinquent named Dominik Bach, the product of a dysfunctional family, featuring a narcissistic mother and an abusive stepfather. Alone, forced to reside in a halfway house with other delinquents, he meets Isabella, who also has “family problems.” She introduces him to turtles: “Caretta caretta,” – the most beautiful animal they have ever seen becomes the object of their quest. Kossitzky, an adult friend with inoperable cancer, invites Dominik and Isabella on his final journey “into the sun.” He rents a boat and they travel in the Mediterranean along the Greek and Turkish coast. Though the two youths fail to commune with Caretta Caretta, Kossitzky’s death brings them together. Then life must go on…although the novel’s conclusion offers no insight into their eventual fate