If someone dethrones in front of a house in a mystery novel and stares in, it is usually clear that the worst will happen soon.
But Sarah Schulman's new novel "Trüb" is not very common, and the person in front of the glass is not a psychopathic killer but a former policewoman. Maggie Terry is her name and does not really know how she ended up here in the middle of this July night and what she really wants in Brooklyn, in front of the house where her ex-girlfriend is watching TV with her new partner. When inside the phone is seized, she takes off.
Sarah Schulman is a writer and high school teacher and a highly respected LGBT and Aids activist in the US. In the 1980s, she wrote two books, "The Sophie Horowitz Story" and "Without Delores," which are among the classics of lesbian crime fiction; after several non-thrillers and non-fiction books, "Trüb" is a kind of return to its beginnings. The story takes place in New York during five days in July 2017.
Maggie has slipped her life for the past thirty years. With each drink, every pill, every line, she lost a little more contact with reality. She missed the birth of her child and she was not there when her black cop colleague was killed.
Drew Stevens
Author Schulman
Then Maggie lost her job and partner and spent 18 months in rehab. Now Maggie is clean, and we accompany her in the first days of her new life. How she sits in her apartment and does not manage to even buy towels, but dries off with her old clothes. How she stands perplexed every morning in the deli, buys a tea and an apple, then does not drink the tea and places the apple in her bag the day before. How she visits Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymus meetings, even though she feels completely out of place there. And above all, as she beats in her new job as an investigator in a posh law firm - Maggie gets right on her first day on the job to investigate in the death of a young theater actress.
"All gone"
At the same time, she has to learn to cope with herself and her situation. The years of addiction and the consequent loss of reality of her heroine also serve to make Schulman look with astonishment and dismay at a New York that she does not recognize. Again and again, Maggie wanders aimlessly through a manhattan that has become strange to her, on double-ovated walks, during which the pictures of the past permanently overlap the present. Painfully she has to learn that the streets of her - anyway questionable - memories no longer exist: "Greenwich Village was suddenly Deadwood." Where was all this? "There was no old lighthouse in the street, no place to find someone for talking, snarling, arresting or fucking found everything gone. "
Price query time:
11.11.2019, 11:36 clock
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DISPLAY
Sarah Schulman
Trüb (Ariadne)
Publishing company:
Argument publisher with Ariadne
Pages:
288
Price:
EUR 20,00
Translated by:
Else Laudan
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Schulman does not care much about the conventions of the detective story, is hardly interested in suspense or perpetrator riddling. Rather, it tells of how a city loses its soul, and what it does to people who have long felt that they are no longer wanted, and who can no longer afford to live here. The novel is a sometimes furious, then again surprisingly funny charge against the excesses of gentrification and also touches other topical issues such as police violence and structural racism.
"The president was a madman"
Above all, "Trüb" works as a haunting portrait of a woman who is at the crossroads of her life and has to face up to her mistakes from the past. Although Schulman narrates in the third person, but stays very close to Maggie, her emotional chaos almost unfiltered to the reader on.
In the guise of a detective novel is "Trüb" - similar to the "Claire DeWitt" series by Sara Gran - ultimately a soul searching . Only when Maggie learns not to understand herself as a victim of circumstances, but to take responsibility for her actions, will she be able to solve the case of the murdered actress.
Murderer caught, policeman sober and rehabilitated - so everything alright? Of course not, because there is no happy ending in Schulman's world. Too much goes wrong in New York, the US, the world. As a cipher for the floating madness Schulman uses - quite obvious - US President and Gentrifizender Donald Trump. The first sentence of the novel sets the mood that goes far beyond reading: "Everyone was completely confused because the president was a madman."
