Cherrypicker | Literature
Sex and text with your ex

In her new novel, Katja Oskamp tells the story of a great love - how it began and how it ended.

By Holger Moos

Katja Oskamp's last book Marzahn, mon amour (2019) was a huge success. In it, she recounts the life of a chiropodist. These are real-life stories - no wonder, as Oskamp herself was a chiropodist for a while because her literary success failed to materialise. The irony of fate was that it was precisely this diversions that suddenly gave her the status of a bestselling author. Her new novel, Die vorletzte Frau (The second to last Woman), is also often set in the lower parts of the body. And once again, the parallels to the author's life are obvious.

The book begins with numbers games. The first-person narrator reports that she was thirty when she met Tosch, the "man of my life", who is 19 years older than her. Their relationship also lasted 19 years. It is quickly revealed that Tosch is Swiss and worked as a guest lecturer at the Leipzig Literature Institute, where the narrator, like the author, studied. In other words, a teacher-student relationship. Tosch's real-life role model is the Swiss author Thomas Hürlimann.

Deader than you

When the two meet, a morbid competition to outdo each other ensues. He says: "My cock was dead," she replies: "I was deader than you, Tosch." He lives in a rigid marriage with a suicidal "actress without roles," one of the little mean things in this book. She has married a Dutch general music director, with whom she has a daughter. But the quickly concluded marriage turns into a "disaster," and she develops a compulsion to clean in order to at least keep the outside world in order.

There is an immediate spark between the first-person narrator and Tosch. Their love affair begins with a grab between his legs and an act of love on the bonnet of a car. This establishes a connection to the person “I had been before the birth of my child”. She quickly trusts Tosch, explicitly “like an animal.” Both experience this new love like a rebirth. In addition to the physical exchange, the intellectual exchange is also important. The protagonist summarises these two pillars of the relationship succinctly: "Sex and text."

After the sexual reawakening, the female protagonist begins her life as a writer - with Tosch as her mentor. He reads and comments on all her texts: “Tosch loved my texts and my arse. I loved Tosch's paws and his editing. We masterfully juggled the task of putting up with each other for better or for worse, with all the quirks and oddities.” The couple experiences a passionate and revealing relationship.

The spare parts phase of life

However, it is also clear from the start that Oskamp has not only written a book about a great love, but also about its end and a search for explanations as to why and what probably led to it failing - namely a serious illness.

When they met, Tosch was 50 years old. He soon realized: "The spare parts phase had begun." It gets even worse: he is diagnosed with prostate cancer. Oskamp describes the ensuing physical misery in detail and does not leave out what it does to her: the lover becomes a caregiver.

The Swiss and his East Berlin chick

Oskamp's novel also reflects class differences. While she comes from a relatively humble background and grew up in a country where, instead of lemons, people only knew pickled cucumbers, the well-established and award-winning Tosch moves in the upper class like a fish in water: He " enjoyed playing at the top ... The son of a politician was familiar with the unwritten laws of the higher circles."

She, on the other hand, is a young accessory who is supposed to wear something pretty on the appropriate occasions. They "mimed the funny couple for professors or editors-in-chief: the slow Swiss and the cheeky East Berlin chick." At least she develops a certain pride in her "ability to change worlds" between Bellevue Palace (the official residence of the president of Germany) and beer pubs.

Melancholy and emancipation

There is something inherently sad about looking back on a past love and a past life. A stroke of fate such as a serious illness deepens the melancholy, making the lightness experienced seem difficult in retrospect. In the novel, Oskamp describes in detail and with aplomb how grateful she is to Tosch for having "made her a writer". Nevertheless, as the "second to last woman" she has to emancipate herself from him at the end: " ‘I no longer wipe up your blood; you no longer read my texts."

The openness and honesty with which Katja Oskamp writes about her life and that of everyone else is astonishing. Of course, they have to be able to bear that when they read it. The novel had Tosch's blessing - and therefore probably Hürlimann's too - because his response after reading the manuscript was: "I have no objections to your book, on the contrary, it is a wonderful love story and I am delighted that I can play a part in it."