Trauma novel "Taxi": The War of the Survivors

First she is the bread woman. A quirky old woman, around 60, who feeds pigeons and watches the first-person narrator. Every day, for four weeks. Then Rosa Kaplan becomes his mother: she breaks his nose with a baseball bat, with the break he looks more like her missing son. Their lives become a sitcom for which Rosa Kaplan wrote the screenplay herself. Two seasons. She and the new son in the lead roles. And in the end, everyone is traumatized.

In her debut novel "Taxi" Cemile Sahin tells about the war. But not from falling bombs, the trenches, the front. But from the years after. From the bereaved. Of those who must live on with the war, "for whom the war no longer stops, even when the war is over," as Sahin says. But it should not be a mere victim story: "If you only portray the characters as victims, you will not do them justice." So Sahin came up with a plot.

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Cemile Sahin
TAXI

Publishing company:

Korbinian

Pages:

220

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Polak, the son of Rosa Kaplan, has disappeared, neither his living self nor his body has come back from the war. They have buried an empty coffin. Rosa Kaplan did not mourn. The mother does not want to accept. Ten years later, Rosa Kaplan sets out to find a man who resembles her son, because she is looking for a cast for her script. In it, her son comes back home, to his mother. And so Rosa Kaplan finds her main cast, the first-person narrator - a man in his mid-thirties, also traumatized. As a child, he pricked a boy's eye with a branch, hid on a tree and saw his parents being carried away in a truck.

Before the narrator slips into the role, he lived alone in a sparsely furnished apartment with two TVs, of which he used only one. After paying, he finally agrees with the absurd plan of the strange woman and plays the hero, the missing son Polak. So that the new polak is even more similar to the old one, Rosa Kaplan has written habits that he memorizes like words: he dresses like Polak, moves like Polak, speaks like Polak.

Quick, the story is full of excitement, tragedy and comedy. The neighbor comes to visit, the fiancée Esra, whose mother Esma. Friends of the family, who also lost their son, who are happy with Rosa Kaplan, then despair even more, because their own child remains missing.

Torture scene in staccato style

Polak had disappeared for ten years. He is supposed to fake amnesia for this time, the statement has Rosa Kaplan included. Sometimes the new son has to improvise. For the mother, who has thought up everything, one feels compassion, but she does not sympathize. Rosa Kaplan savors her plan - if it does not go the way she wrote it in the script, she hits her with her wooden spoon until it breaks into two pieces of wood.

In the beginning, the author does not make it easy to get into the story. Her novel starts with a torture scene in staccato style. Short sentences are ranked in a row. Two words, three words. Sahin wanted to create a setting that gets thrown in, like a movie. That's how she created her novel, she says. The scene at the beginning was there at the beginning, it was the picture with which the 29-year-old has written off.

The story does not follow the script. It continues to evolve. Like the relationship between the new son and Rosa Kaplan, which blurs more and more between reality and script. The new polak sinks into his role, his thoughtful past mingling with his real memories. His return tore old wounds and gradually hurt the fiancée Esra, her mother Esma and the family friends. Until everyone is suffering. Then the show Rosa Kaplan is no longer enough. She wants justice, together they commit injustice. That changes everything.

Paul Niedermayer / Korbinian

Cemile Sahin: "I want to take over the direction myself"

Author Cemile Sahin was born in Wiesbaden as the daughter of a Kurdish family. As a teenager, she saw a film by French documentary filmmaker Chris Marker that influenced her so much that she wanted to make films. She was the first in her family to choose a creative profession. Sahin studied art in Berlin and London. Her previous main medium is video art, for which she received an Academy scholarship and was honored with the Ars Viva Prize.

Sahin has made her debut as a writer, it is strongly linked to her previous artistic work: There are no chapters, but episodes, Vorblenden and Cliffhanger; Sahin uses short sentences like cuts in film. She wants to film her novel, there should have been offers. "I want to take over the direction myself," she says.