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Author Ohde: Your heroine is and remains a loner
Photo:
Heike Steiweg / Suhrkamp
It's the little things that populate the memory.
A smell, a gesture, the "always smoothly shaved legs" of the mother of a friend who lives in a single-family house, with ornamental lawn and sprinkler machine: "Paradise was in this enclosed garden".
At least for the first-person narrator of Deniz Ohde's first novel, born in Germany in 1988, an elementary school student at the time "when the houses were on fire".
Mölln 1992, Solingen 1993, Lübeck 1996.
The mother of the first-person narrator does not talk about it, nor does she explain the "graffiti at the exit" and the swear word with K, because that "is nothing that a child needs to know".
The mother comes from Turkey, she married a German worker.
The heroine, the only child of this wordless, unhappy marriage, tells her story in "Scattered Light", which is one of advancement through education, a positive case in statistics.
But this educational novel debut, which landed on the shortlist for the German Book Prize at the beginning of the week, still brings with it sadness, feelings of foreignness and non-belonging, the emotional stress is enormous.
A class story?
Yes and no
The double discrimination that Ohde's protagonist experienced, as the daughter of a Turkish mother and a German proletarian, weighs down every step.
The inevitable success of their integration is a result in the tabular curriculum vitae for which there will be no echo in the mind.
And finally: What do you do with a degree in the humanities if nobody tells you what to do?
"This path that the others took so naturally remained a mystery to me."
A class story?
Yes and no.
Because Ohde's heroine is and remains a loner.
There are many in the Federal Republic with whom she has a lot in common.
But nothing develops in her family that connects her with others.
It belongs to a milieu, but only in the statistics: one parent is a migrant, the household is financed by a salary, the apartment is rented;
no abnormality.
But also no habits, no structures that your family shares with others.
No sports club, no union, no regulars' table, no active neighborhood.
The mother has left her origins behind and cannot find a new home, the father makes life full of compulsions, fears and precautionary measures.
“It would never have occurred to him to sort something out because there could always be a
bad time
.” We were bombed twice, it was explanation enough why it had to be two loaves of bread and not just one, why not a reduced ten pack of socks from
real
, but better two.
A mixture of gluttony and self-mortification. "
In aphoristic insights like this one shows a grim, analytical humor - just as Ohde's view of the world of her narrator is an unsentimental, sober one.
Her perception of details and her ability to create atmospheres from them is remarkable.
But the detailed protocol, with which she not only brings the gloomy and hopelessness of this life before the eyes, but also before all the senses of the reader - smells, sounds, bodily feelings, all of which are as present as the appearance - also has its price.
For as saving as the combination of close observation and emotional distance may be for the first-person narrator, it can be crippling for her readers.
The scenes of dense description, as ethnology calls it, are layered on top of one another like the justifications for a judgment that is fixed from the start.
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