Cherrypicker
Home at last

In his new novel, Wolf Haas tells of a mother’s tragicomic life and sends his regards to the afterlife.

By Holger Moos

It’s unlikely that the mother of author Wolf Haas was familiar with Berlin singer Christiane Rösinger’s song Eigentumswohnung. But she might have liked it. Throughout her busy life as a mother she, too, harboured the unfulfilled desire to own property.

Haas is best known for his crime novels about private detective Simon Brenner. But now in the novel Eigentum (Property) he’s written a literary epitaph for his mother, who died in 2018. The narrator’s mother is almost 95 years old, merely “a frail little bird” and is dying.

Three days before her death, she asks her son to call her parents and relatives and tell them that she’s doing well. The son is stunned: “All my life, my mum made me believe that she was not doing well... This must be a mistake.” After briefly pondering whether a little white lie is morally justifiable, he concludes that he shouldn’t tell her a stupid fairy tale. But then he can’t help himself: “I called... They all send their love, they’re fine too. Only your father has a cold. But he’s already on the mend.” He immediately regrets it, because a long conversation ensues about his long-dead grandfather’s cold and the phrase he used, which not only leads to discussion of the linguistic philosopher Wittgenstein, but also to the son’s wish to have this very phrase as his own epitaph: “ON THE MEND.”

Is it possible to write about life?

Instead of a eulogy, the son wants to write a novel about his mother. He’s in a race against time because he wants to finish the book before she passes. He wants to rid himself of “the memory and everything.” He also needs to prepare a poetry lecture. He doesn’t yet know what he’ll tell his audience, but at least he already has a name for his lecture: “Is it possible to write about life?” A good title is half the battle.

The old people’s home where the mother is vegetating was formerly the maternity hospital where her son and his brother were born. A circle closes, demographic change even affects buildings. A penchant for the morbid was present in the son’s life at an early age: he remembers his childhood home with its view of the cemetery where he loved to watch the gravedigger at work.

The art of repetition

Alongside the first-person narrator, his mother also has her say time and again, her litanies delivered in a tone that betrays her rural origins. The story loops back multiple times; Haas is known as a master of the art of repetition. And the mother in the novel is a master of “the rhetorical triad”: “All day long just work work work.” Or: “Just washing cleaning ironing all day.” She doesn’t like “those people.” The men in her life are losers, drunks, gamblers and only give her one thing: “Worry worry worry.”

And finally, another three-fold mantra by his mother influenced her son from a very early age: “Just years of saving saving saving.” “I thought the phases of the building society contract (savings phase, allotment phase, loan phase) were a nursery rhyme.” However, everything she saved was eaten up by another theme in her life: inflation. In 1923, the year she was born, hyperinflation hit the world. The “development of the price per square metre” is given its own separate chapter.

The family grave as a cliffhanger

The mother is left with one last illusion of ownership to signal economic, indeed life success: the 1.7 square metres of a family cemetery plot where she will join her husband who was buried there years ago. Her last resting place is already move-in-ready, even her name and date of birth have already been engraved on the “door,” like a “golden cliffhanger.”

With his characteristic flippant humour yet a great deal of compassion, Haas’s slim novel tells of a mother’s lifelong, futile but tireless quest for material security. And, as always with Haas, the book is full of maxims like one in defence of stubbornness that is also socially relevant in this age of alternative facts: “You can’t let every little thing, say the absence of a truth, throw you off track.”