TAXI (2008), BY THE HAMBURG-BORN AUTHOR Karen Duve, tells the story of Alex, a young female taxi driver in Hamburg during the six years of her work for the taxi company Mergolan before the novel ends in a car crash. The simple plot might suggest that almost nothing happens in this text, which deals with the protagonist’s various encounters with passengers inside the taxi and with (mostly) men outside the taxi and features a surprise ending. However, Taxi is more than a drive-through: it is an accomplished literary portrayal of the individual in a postmodern cityscape. Drawing on cultural theories analyzing how people engage with the city and its inhabitants, this essay will explore Duve’s images of taxi driving as a metaphor for postmodern life.

Taxi (2008) is not only the story of a female taxi driver in Hamburg, it is also a literary tour through Duve’s recent work. Taxi features unusual characters from her previous books: the dwarf Pedsi from the fairy-tale parody Die entführte Prinzessin: Von Drachen, Liebe und anderen Ungeheuern (The kidnapped princess: Of dragons, love, and other monsters, 2005), who is smitten with the chambermaid Rosamonde. She, in turn, is tall and good-looking like the female protagonist in Taxi, and like her has to overcome inner and outer obstacles before she finally realizes her love for a smaller man. Taxi also features characters resembling the mean taxi drivers from the children’s book Weihnachten mit Thomas Müller (Christmas with Thomas Müller, 2003) who brutally kick a poor lost teddy bear, who cannot pay his fare home, out of a taxi and into the freezing night; and, finally, a chimpanzee that seems to have jumped right out of Duve and Thies Völker’s Lexikon der berühmten Tiere (Encyclopedia of famous animals, 1997) and into Alex’s taxi.

These three perhaps lesser-known works already highlight the wide array of literary genres Duve engages with and draws upon in Taxi. It is characteristic for her writing that none of these three books stays within the traditional boundaries of fairytale, encyclopedia, or children’s story, respectively, but treat their templates with irony: Pedsi laments his unrequited love for the tall Rosamonde in New Age psychoanalytical jargon; the teddy bear’s taxi-driver introduces a realistic brutality to the Christmassy children’s story that is underlined by his bumper-sticker “DEATH PENALTY FOR TAXI MURDERERS”; and the Lexikon der berühmten Tiere mocks the traditional value of an enkuklios paideia (all-round education) by devoting its entries to characters from so-called “low culture” generally assumed to have very little educational value, like advertising, comics, or television.