Cherrypicker
A reckoning or rapprochement

Coming to terms with absent fathers is the central theme of the novels by Necati Öziri and Deniz Utlu. One gives rise to anger, the other to melancholy.

By Holger Moos

Autofiction, that is to say literary writing about one’s own life, is seriously en vogue, and has been for some time. It is a question of getting to grips with the way that one is shaped by one’s origins and family. In the process, the boundaries between what one has actually experienced and what one has invented can become blurred.

A number of novels in which the respective author explores their relationship with their parents have appeared this year. Often it is death that prompts them to look more closely at their forebears. Both Maxim Biller and Wolf Haas for example have written novels (Mama Odessa and Eigentum / Property respectively) in memory of their mothers, who had died just a few years previously – accounts that are as derisive as they are affectionate. Rather than basing her novel Mutters Stimmbruch (Mother’s Voice Breaks) on reality, Katharina Mevissen instead creates powerful and at times bizarrely surrealistic images as she takes a retrospective look at her mother.

In Germany, literature about fathers traditionally involves coming to terms with the country’s Nazi past; in some of these works, such as Bernward Vesper’s 1977 novel-essay Die Reise (The Journey), there is a public “reckoning” with the father. By contrast, today’s books about fathers tend not to be about having a reckoning with them but about rapprochement, as Ralph Gerstenberg observed in a 2021 Deutschlandfunk podcast.

Books about fathers with a rather different perspective came courtesy this year of Necati Öziri with his debut novel Vatermal (Birthmark) and Deniz Utlu with Vaters Meer (Father’s Sea). Both authors write about their Turkish fathers and about what migration experiences mean to their families.

Book to his father

Just as Kafka never sent off his expansive Letter to His Father, Öziri’s Vatermal is a “book to his father” that will presumably never be read by him either. In both instances, writing is an attempt to process father-son conflicts, to come closer to finding answers to questions from the past that it will never be possible to answer conclusively.

In Kafka’s case, the son writes: “My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast.” In Öziri’s case too, the son Arda, who is in hospital and possibly dying, reproaches his father. Yet Arda’s father is a phantom; Arda never got to know him, as his father abandoned the family and started a new family in Turkey. Father and son have a physical similarity; each has a birthmark on his face. The German for birthmark is Muttermal (a “mother mark”) – Öziri turns this into a Vatermal (“father mark”) in an ironic play on the lack of any relationship between them in real life.

Arda imagines his father in all kinds of different ways. In anger, he imagines him as an “arsehole father”. At another point he doesn’t believe that he was a bad father. Time and again, the first-person narrator addresses his father directly, calling him not Papa but Metin: “After prison, you probably became the gentlest, most loving father.” Unfortunately, however, this was only the case in his second family.

Blank spaces

In Utlu’s Vaters Meer, the first-person narrator Yunus is thirteen years old when his father Zeki suffers two strokes. Zeki then lives on for another ten years with locked-in syndrome, able to communicate only by moving his eyes. Yunus’ mother cares for Zeki until he dies. In the novel, Yunus recalls experiences and images from his childhood – and the life of his father, with many blank spaces, gaps that Yunus has to fill with the power of his imagination. Yunus’ father is also a phantom, albeit one with a physical presence: “Father had become a narrative, he had ceased to be a person.”

The family originally came from the ancient town of Mardin, situated close to the Turkish-Syrian border in the historical region of Mesopotamia. A melting pot of different peoples and religions, the city was seen as a symbol of cosmopolitanism. For Yunus, as well as for his father, Mardin is a place that triggers all kinds of memories. At one point, a visit to Mardin is described as “an unexpected journey into the past, back to the time in which they lived at the point where infinity began”.

Anger and melancholy

The tone of Öziri’s book about his father differs considerably from that used in the novel written by Utlu. While the dichotomy between youthful anger and the protagonist’s wish nonetheless to reach some kind of reconciliation with his vanished father takes centre stage in Öziri’s novel, Utlu’s Vaters Meer is a poetical and melancholic book of memories that oscillates between love for a strong father figure and the painful loss of this father figure while still alive.

Both books have quite rightly been singled out from the mass of new publications. Öziri’s Vatermal received a nomination this year for the aspekte literary prize awarded by German broadcaster ZDF and was shortlisted for the German Book Prize. In the jury’s opinion, the novel “captures the sound of the street: angry, quick-witted, funny and tender. His youthful heroes try to find their way in a society in which they never really arrive. Öziri opens our eyes to this German reality.”

Utlu was awarded this year’s Bavarian Book Prize. Writing about Vaters Meer, jury member Marie Schoeß, an author and presenter with the regional broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk, said that Utlu “discovers one thing above all: the power of storytelling. Once he has realized that memories can be shaped, this son gets to work and writes his personal version of the family’s history. He brings with him a wonderful sense of multilingualism, an enthusiasm for playing with different narrative traditions and eyes that are open to the warmth of his own home.”