Someone is after Stella. Only through violence comes this haunting stalking to an end. One end
Photo: photolia / madochab
If any of the book titles still not known? “All love the beginning” – such was the name of a band featuring sexy photographs of Anja Müller. In 1972 there were also times a DDR-TV movie of that name. Judith Hermann was born in 1970 in West Berlin; they will hardly know him. But perhaps the most beautiful poem by Eva Strittmatter “early love” about getting older and the desire to capture the feelings of youth which soars to an apotheosis mature togetherness at the end. “Only when you know they can end, you reach the beginning of love.” Whether Stella and Jason will experience in this novel probably ever as a beginning?
A too momentous book titles Judith Hermann has chosen, but one that goes easy on the tongue. Even to Agatha Christie he would have fit. You want to know what for here »all love to be the beginning of” likes. Loneliness and desire? Stella had a fear of flying, so she sat down beside Jason and took his hand. She needed him at that moment, then it was rooted their marriage. That it was also later, she had no doubt, but she can feel it only briefly. And he probably also. He is tilers, working away on building sites. Always a few days they can be together in their house, but since he also sometimes creeps into his room.
That her literary figures away all bread work mused that one has young German authors sometimes accused. A tiler has not seen too long in a novel. For this purpose, a geriatric nurse whose activities are described in detail, which is very caring to their patients and can give them as much time to devote – even wash strawberries, arrange flowers, drink another coffee, talking, without looking at the clock – it hardly be should be a cash performance. But it is as one would wish for the elderly: a togetherness. The friendly young woman also benefits from the experience of the ancients. In their composure, the author sets a contrast to the excitement to the almost everything in the book.
When Stella pushes her bike home, it brings before that Ava from kindergarten. Wonderful is Judith Hermann – she now has a 14-year-old son – the mindless chatter of the little girl succeeded in their open-mindedness and self-forgetfulness in the game. This self-dealing Resting – sometime it lost during growth and returns only when one is very lucky, in old age again. Ava is in the book the Lichtfünkchen while brewing over the family something dark.
The place: a village settlement near a major city. You greet each other, but it is not so that everyone would know everyone. In the past this may have been different, today it is the usual, that all disappear after their work in their homes. In any case remains for Personal too little time. Stella, we learn at the very beginning: it is like to be alone (which they could have in common with the author). Short sentences in the present tense apply their tasks. Which are already on page 22 – the woman is just washing dishes – interrupted by a ringing sound. A young man, actually quite handsomely expressed, using the intercom, the desire to have a little talk with her. What would have happened if they had opened the door?
We will not learn it. If the man is ringing every day and sometimes even any list is in the mailbox, Stella watched him, hidden in the house, and is increasingly perturbed. Jason, which she tells it seems, for a moment even move away from her. Jealousy, anger, resignation, as if he had his wife never quite familiar. And Stella is hidden behind the helplessness at not still something quite different disturbing? Curiosity? Longing for a different life?
Where will tilt the story? It was Judith Hermann’s art has always been to designate something exactly in a clear, rhythmic language and to be somehow in limbo. But why the enigmatic man just called Mr. Pfister – after the character from a TV series? Will she push him away from the reality? Stella’s invention? No, it is not, he is not a “damned ghost,” but quite real. As you would also be able to react in real, but in this case the action would be tipped into banality and would not have expressed what the author had in mind.
A mirror cabinet: Mr. Pfister probably represents only the extreme of what all the characters of this book – is intrinsically – up to Ava. They yearn for a togetherness and must be closed but for each other. Every man his own world – which is basically quite normal, especially for people who are mentally active, but Judith Hermann is the problem only too aware
.
These doubts that accompany a constantly whether it is “right,” as one lives, these fears that suddenly an abyss could open up in which all the happiness disappears. Why can not we live in the moment, why must one’s imagination always spoil everything? Dark side of sensibility: the perceived knowledge on how fragile soil to move. It will not disappear, even if Judith Hermann and the reader finally begrudge that the stalking-spook for Stella today. This is possible only through violence. Liberation from the fear-load? One would be naive to believe that could be forever.
A small, haunting scene in the book: Ava wants the mother tells her the story of the giraffe and the little prince, what Stella at the moment – yes comes before – quite reluctant. But: “You tried, for fear of the thought they might regret later years, have not told the story of Ava … … This repentance accompanied Stella always …”
This is true. Thus we have arrived in the depth of the text in which something happens very different, what only the author knows. From this depth comes out at the end of a statement, which also reflects its opposite in itself: “Perhaps it is so that the presence of one, its light, irresistible Ge-weight … change is not treason, and if they do, then he is not punished. “
Judith Hermann: All love the beginning. Novel. S. Fischer Verlag. 219 pp, b, € 19.99.
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