Something True, Something Cruel, Something Real – The Stories of Mr G. A novel by Marc Wagenbach (2025)
“A lyrical road movie through queerness, memory, and camp – where even the trashiest gesture reveals a truth.”
Something True, Something Cruel, Something Real is a novel for our time: nonlinear, multiperspectival, emotionally raw, and spiritually restless. It is not afraid to shimmer where others stay silent. It’s a book for dreamers in a fucking hopeless world.
Synopsis
Max Grünbaum, mid-forties, queer, wounded, returns with his partner Hieronymus to Ekeby — a quiet estate in the countryside that quickly becomes anything but peaceful. What was meant as a space for rest and ritual becomes a stage for longing, rupture, and return.
Max lives between lives: between academic detachment and emotional hunger, between intimacy and distance, between who he is and who he’s trying to remember being.
Surrounded by friends who each carry their own silences — Leander with his barbed grief. Lea, too smart to stay close. Hanna, drifting between cultic healing and loneliness. Max begins to sense what he’s truly looking for:
connection. Belonging. Meaning.
The novel shifts between a lush, intoxicating midsummer gathering and the shadow-drenched Rauhnächte — the Twelve Nights of Winter. What begins as play and reflection becomes ritual and revelation. Time folds. Ghosts appear.Forgotten words resurface. The estate breathes with memory—erotic, painful, tender.
Jozef’s journals emerge, and Max realizes: history is not behind him. It’s inside him.
Told in lyrical, fragmented scenes, this is one part emotional séance, one part queer Bildungsroman, one part autofictional kaleidoscope. It’s camp. It’s fragile. It’s funny. And always searching.
Tone and Character
Written in poetic vignettes and shifting timelines, the novel blends autofiction, queer mythology, and psychological realism. Its intimacy is not soft but electric—charged with desire, disappointment, silence, and transformation. A book for anyone who has ever loved too carefully, needed too much, or dared to begin again. With nothing but words, and maybe someone listening.
“I write to give voice to my unconscious. To feel what has always connected us.” – Marc Wagenbach
MW 