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The new book of the German writer Judith Hermann is a fascinating creature. The inaugural outing of the first imprint of the book of GRANTA magazine, We would have everything seemed consists of three interconnected tests which are partly read as memories, partly self -fiction. They were initially put into service for the series of conferences on the poetics of the University of Francfurt, but the tone is, refreshing, far from being educational. The translation of Katy Derbyshire is elegant and polite.
Young people and twenty-art dreamy people who have populated Summerhouse, later (1998), the first short-term collection of Hermann, which has become an international bestseller, is now firmly at the average but also emotionally as ever. Children are born and grow, established and abandoned careers, loves, weddings and friendly and dismantled friendships. Malades and die, parents are aging. The past seems more sticky in the fifties and the calculations are looming.
“Each story has its first line. Not the line with which history begins in the book; The line with which she begins in my mind. ” Hermann's narrator entered and outside the analysis; She is also thoughtful and fun with the sentences that she is with her thoughts. After drinking a night late in Berlin with “G., my only writer friend”, she sees her former psychiatrist, a Dr Dreehüs. Their professional relationship had ended some time before, suddenly, on the death of the sclerosis in plates of the close friend of the narrator Marco, who is part of a loose group which spent time in the summer house of Hermann's family by the sea.
Marco is part of his past, she Electoral familyOr his chosen family, these replacements for the family of origin which are so often manufactured in young people. Living and dead, he is looming as a striking physical presence through the story; Like Ada, an equally charismatic and energetic character. It is via Ada's recommendation that Hermann found the psychiatrist – how close their friendship, but never near, ceased.
The psychiatrist and former patient, this busy night, will drink together. But it is not the catalyst of an additional link specified between them – instead, the second section of the book is deeply immersed in the exploration of the analysis of his childhood and, in a subliminal way, the reasons for his search for analysis. It is richly presented – a detailed party of memory and trauma, whether directly experienced or transmitted, because Hermann builds the history of his family and his place.
Her paternal grandmother was Russian: when she was a child “she had been brought to Germany on a sleigh during the revolution and sometimes wore a silver spindle modeled on a Troika”. This parent occupies the front of the scene in Hermann's education in the Cold War “Divided Berlin”, the east “Foggy and Lifeless”. His mother works all day as a florist and her father is subject to severe and debilitating depression. “My father closed the curtains and cried, then he broke the dishes … My mother came back in a unfathomable way; sometimes I felt that I had imagined that my mother.” His father built his daughter a doll house and later a puppet theater – what best symbols for a dysfunctional family? She remains obsessed with a doll, Anna, well in adulthood, and by a scary children's book, shaped on a building similar to that in which she lives, called The yellow house. Jung's theory that the house represents the psyche is never more relevant than here.
In the third part, we return today and the recent pandemic. Hermann inherited the house by the sea of her beloved grandmother: she appears in all her work. She is now divorced with a son and in a provisional relationship with a photographer. A visit to his parents in Lockdown contains all the tension of childhood and a deeper understanding too. “Remember work,” writes Hermann. And it is the figure of the most dead grandmother who dominates as she ages. His “beautifully sad and difficult life” continues in this luminous dialogue of self and soul.
We would have everything seemed by Judith Hermann, translated by Katy Derbyshire GRANTA £ 12.99, 208 pages
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