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Author Russell: Relentless Truths
Photo: David Kasnic
Vanessa Wyes was 15 years old when she first had sex with her English teacher.
The girl had begged her parents to send her to a private boarding school in Maine. In the prospectus the school looked perfect, snow-white wooden facades, brick walls.
She hadn't been able to make real friendships in the course of the first year, but at the beginning of the second year everything changed: Jacob Strane gave the opening speech, a 42-year-old, tall, bearded, with a somewhat over-correct manner of speaking.
Vanessa hadn't noticed him until then.
Your new literature teacher.
It begins almost imperceptibly: her poems are remarkably good, says Strane, and her hair is the color of autumn maple leaves.
He gives her books to read, poems by Sylvia Plath, "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov.
And it makes her feel more interesting than the others.
As if by chance he presses his leg against hers and says that he would like to wrap her up in a big bed.
Vanessa's thoughts soon revolve around this teacher, the almost 30 years older man.
The first kiss then emanates from her, an awkward attempt to finally take the step that his weeks of manipulations and seductions amount to.
The novel "My Dark Vanessa" - which is a debut - the author Kate Elizabeth Russell has put a short text in front of it, in which she emphatically emphasizes that her story is fictional and not autobiographical.
She then tells with decided accuracy how a girl who does not feel comfortable with her peers is selected by a grown man and entangled in an obsessive love story.
Nothing should shake the illusion
The plot develops on different time levels,
the chapters are only headed with years, which makes it easier to find your way around, as Russell works with many flashbacks and flashbacks.
It starts in 2017, Vanessa works as a receptionist in a hotel and follows on social media that Jacob Strane is being accused of sexual assault by another former high school student.
It quickly becomes clear that Vanessa is still in contact with him, that even in her early thirties she is still convinced that their love story was something unique.
Nothing can and should shake this illusion, no scandal and no other man, this is the only way Vanessa can bear the memories.
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Title: My Dark Vanessa: Novel - The New York Times Best Seller
Publisher: C. Bertelsmann Verlag
Number of pages: 448
Author: Russell, Kate Elizabeth
Buy for € 20.00
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02.09.2020 4.45 p.m.
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The other storyline begins in 2000 with the first meeting between Vanessa and Strane and continues into 2007, when she is 22 and too old to be desirable for him.
There are some implacable truths in the book, and because Russell has penetrated the subject emotionally, it can easily be broader.
Russell exposes the romantic cliché that only a love that overcomes obstacles, which is accompanied by prohibitions and suffering, can be a great love as a prerequisite for such pedophile abuse stories.
In the "Lolita" edition, which Vanessa borrowed from Strane at the beginning, she sticks to the formulation of "mythical power".
For her, the book is an indication of the teacher's intentions, but after reading it, she also believes she could be his equal.
"I have power. Power to make it happen. Power over him. Stupid that I haven't thought of it myself."
Obsession that destroys a young person
Without being clumsy or superficial, Russell shows how much the Lolita motif has shaped pop culture - the singer Fiona Apple is mentioned, Britney Spears or the actress Kirsten Dunst in "The Virgin Suicides" - all nymph-like heroines who this role model for make young girls desirable.
You can read "My Dark Vanessa" as a commentary on Nabokov's "Lolita" and its reception (the title of the novel quotes a line from another Nabokov novel, from "Pale Fire").
The joy in the musicality of Nabokov's language and in the sophistication of his novel construction outshines the objection that "Lolita", from a man's perspective, tells of an obsession that destroys a young person.
The fact that Russell turns her heroine into a first-person narrator gives this experience a voice.
After "My Dark Vanessa" was published in the USA in the spring, Russell was confronted with allegations of plagiarism by the author Wendy C. Ortiz.
She rejected that.
But the allegation that a white writer was using the experiences of an unnoticed Mexican-born author was so serious that Russell announced in a few words that her novel was based on personal experiences in her teenage years.
The text preceding the novel that claims otherwise should protect your privacy.
"My dark Vanessa" is not just about the one abuse story that she experienced herself, about the individual case.
Your novel tells how present the seductive, childlike woman is in our culture, how much she is artistically exaggerated and how fatal that can be.
Kate Elizabeth Russell:
"My Dark Vanessa".
Translated from the English by Ulrike Thiesmeyer.
C. Bertelsmann;
448 pages;
20 Euros.
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