It’s incredible: one of the best-selling books in Germany is Axolotl Roadkill, by Helene Hegemann. It’s about a 16-year-old “exploring Berlin’s drug and club scene after the death of her mother.” I haven’t read it, so I can’t vouch for its brilliance. So what, exactly, makes this incredible, and why, exactly, am I writing about it?
Three reasons:
1. The author is 17-years-old. She’s already written a play, as well as a movie (released in theaters). She’s done what most of us aspire to do in a life-time, and hasn’t even started college.
2. It has been discovered that (and Hegemann has admitted to) full pages of text from her novel have been lifted, word for word, from other books, including an already-published but lesser-known novel Strobo.
3. Even after this discovery, her novel has still been announced a finalist for the $20,000 Leipzig Book Fair prize, with the panel well aware of the plagiarism charges.
For me, this is shocking—I was trained that even a single similar sentence was the mark of an unethical writer—enough to get me sued, kicked out of school, earn me a permanent mark of writerly shame. Now, in many colleges, students are required to submit their papers through an electronic filter, which scans them for word sequences similar to each other and to famous works.
So, how does this girl get away with it? She claims she’s “mixing”—and that when the same words are put into a different context, they convey different meanings, and so do not constitute plagiarism. I guess she sees a book something like a recipe—each page an ingredient that can be put together in different ways to create a different entrée. But I don’t know.
The idea of “mixing” isn’t new. And the arguments in its favor are strong. First, I mean, let’s be reasonable here—you’re obviously bound to use the same words in sequences similar to someone else every time you talk or write. We’re just not that original, and most of our vocabularies aren’t that expansive. Second: it’s totally true that you can create something new and different from a combination of other people’s thoughts…check out this Harper’s article–a brilliant essay discussing the boundaries of plagiarism, much of the essay “borrowed” from other works itself. That article didn’t strike me as unethical.
So what makes this Axolotl Roadkill instance feel so different? Perhaps it’s that, unlike the Harper’s article author, who cited his sources at the end, Hegemann didn’t admit to “mixing” until she was caught. Or perhaps it feels different because she is receiving such strong recognition for “her” work.
Or maybe it really isn’t any different, and I’m just jealous of her early success.
What do you think?
Read the original New York Times article here.
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). It’ll also involve your body (which we all know is good for the mind). It only feels cold until you start moving!! So grab the kids, the spouse, the parents, the dog, and play like you haven’t since you were in fifth grade, relive the jubilance of a day free of work, the joy in spontaneity…and then go back inside, and do the same with your writing!
