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Elke Heidenreich
I have a top book for you this week that really reads like a western. And then I thought, it's also set in the Wild West, it's set in Michigan and I looked at it on the map. It's very high up in the northeast, but it still sounds like the deepest Wild West and is called "Big Sky Country". It was published by Callan Wink at Suhrkamp and it is a big, quiet one, I would almost say a novel of development, so you can even say an educational novel. Because it's about a young man. His name is August, and he has very different parents. When they are young and in love, everything goes well. But this love subsides The book starts when August is 12 years old and love is actually already in the bucket. The father is a farmer on a farm with cattle. There's a lot of work there. There is a rough, gruff tone and August helps him. Father and son get along well. The mother imagined a completely different life. At some point she moved into the old farmhouse next door, which had belonged to her parents, reads, does other things and doesn't like the way August is developing.
For example, the father says: "We have way too many cats here, kill them and for every tail you bring me nailed to a board you get a dollar." And August kills the cats. That is pretty early on already and nailing the tails on a board. And you actually don't want to read any further and think: It's brutal. And there is always an undertone of, I wouldn't say of brutality, but of violence, of danger in this whole thing, the book. But that has to do with the fact that it takes place in a rough, rough area. If you're squeamish about that, you probably can't survive. We're a little worried about August though.
And one day the mother decides to leave here. Also for his sake. And she takes a job as a librarian in Montana. It's also high up in the north, but more to the west. And now they go back and forth on the phone, the taciturn son and the father don't talk much. And August starts working on farms again in Montana. Hard to work. He's reliable, he's quiet, he plays football. He made new friends. He's also having an affair with a girl. He gets to know love. But he doesn't know exactly what love actually is. And he thinks of what his father gave him on the way, two pieces of advice: "Never take a cheap razor and don't shave until you're 20." And the second has to do with women: "A woman is at some point your outsourced conscience and therefore you have to make sure that you choose the right one, otherwise you are a ship without a rudder. Perhaps the best thing about a man is what his wife has of him, what he could be and what he could do if she could only get him to. A good woman is perhaps the only hope of salvation for a man on earth. Do you understand? ”No, August doesn't understand that yet. And yet he is slowly developing in a direction that his mother likes more than his father, although we suspect that the father also thinks differently, but cannot act differently in his life.
And one day mother and son go back to Michigan, visit their father and then it's like, and we're back in the western, as if someone was riding away in the sunset. So August drives away in his car and sees father and mother sitting together intimately in the rearview mirror. And he knows: in the end they love each other too. They just can't live together. And he has to find his way in life too. And we suspect it, he's going to college, he's not going to be a farmer. Callan Wink's Big Sky Country is a beautiful development novel. Long, calm, quiet, like a beautiful western with gold rim, well told and a book that brings us a little closer to lost America, the people who probably voted for Trump because they saw hope in him. They're not all idiots. They have a hard life and make promises. But not August.
