“If you are going to shit yourself,” goes the first sentence of the filthy and brilliant Calls May Be Recorded, “it’s most likely to happen on your own doorstep.” This is what happens to Jimmie, a heavy call center employee experimenting with his mother’s make-up who spends the day disarming his clients, quipping with his coworkers, and dreaming of his lips wrapped around his supervisor’s cock, who now seems to be curiously avoiding him.
Jimmie chats with uber-wealthy vacationers who have time to complain about small pools, the color of their hotel rooms, the French staff who appear to be making fun of them, all of whom think to pick up a landline instead of enjoying the locale. “Even the last bits of wilderness had been arranged to please the eye of some mindless lens,” he thinks. Jimmie is funny and raunchy, tender, and, actually, somewhat good at his job; a gentle caller turns into an opportunity for phone sex that’s at once affecting and hot (and liberating for Jimmie, who can act out his gender-swapping fantasies). But his humor shines when he interacts with his colleagues, like Joan Rivers reincarnated as a possibly transgender overweight service worker.
“Was it the language that made their fascism so severe?” he thinks about the German Wolfgang. “Had that cluster of unfuckable sounds that they could never hide and that had come to haunt them — like a razor blade in a cake — inspired those famous genocidal urges and driven then to try and exterminate the Jews and their more melodic ways, in the same way nobody was allowed to have fun at a party where the host couldn’t dance?”
Volckmer’s pen is ruthless, her mind absurd and wonderfully perverted. A disgruntled cleaner “probably had the word ‘HATE’ tattooed on his cock.” Italian men were “overgrown with hair and self-esteem… ready to fuck like heroes because the gold dangling from their necks was a sign from God.” Jimmie loves wearing the “little skullcaps” and hearing the “sad vowels” at a Jewish funeral, whose men aren’t naturally funny, not like Italians. “When you say that you’re Italian, people just laugh — it’s like you were born with a red nose,” he tells a Jewish coworker. He responds, “Only your nose didn’t get you turned to ash.” (Us Jews are a frequent target for the German Volckmer, almost like an undue victory lap after… well, you know.)
Like a David Sedaris or Lexi Freiman read, I laughed quite a bit at Volckmer’s shocking, offensive humor — something you can get only if you escape the purity olympics of the American contemporary scene and into the German grit (fitting for the novelist, who has a different book titled ‘Jewish Cock.’ One of the funniest novels of the year, Calls May Be Recorded is offensive and distasteful in all the best ways.
Calls May Be Recorded is out now.
