Domestic calamities
The best of a German novel may been have lost in translation.
Ialmost loved this book. It’s led by an Everymum, Katharina, who is endlessly ferrying around her kids, Helli and Alex, and dealing with a cascade of household calamities. Even when she carves out a moment for herself, she realises, she does so at a time that’s convenient for her family – and only because she knows she must not burn out. Flinching at that? Me too.
“Look at me,” the title demands, and Katharina gives us no option. She is frank and self-aware, to the point that it seems she’s alongside the reader, peering at herself with interest. This makes for an unusual detachment of tone – closeness with an air of cool. “I love Helli a little bit more than everyone else in our family does,” she notes, neutrally. I liked it.
I particularly liked the passages in which she tunes out of the domestic here and now, a part of her still deeply in thrall to the classical music she sidelined in choosing this life. We watch her in thrall, also, to an old friend. Moral boundaries are crossed with a minimum of angst and self-loathing and I liked that, too. It’s good to be in the company of a woman at ease with herself. But catastrophe, or at least an epiphany, looms.
As a teen, Katharina watched her mother die young of breast cancer. Now she has a lump in her own breast. A queer sort of energy runs through this story. Frustration, a keen anxiety; if it were music, it would be in a minor key, no question. It crescendos to one of the strangest endings I have ever read.
So, there is much to relish.
But something is missing – a magic that makes great books go – and I can’t quite put my finger on it, other than to say there is a lack. A thinness, like the taste of stevia when you’re used to sugar.
This is the first of celebrated German author Krügel’s four novels to be translated into English. My best guess is that some nuance was lost in the process.