Cherrypicker | Literature
Beyond Repair

In her new book, Angelika Klüssendorf revisits the painful childhood and youth of the girl from her novel trilogy.
 

By Holger Moos

“The girl is back” announced Piper Verlag on the publication of Angelika Klüssendorf’s new book. The girl in question refers to the autobiographical novel trilogy Das Mädchen (2011), April (2014) and Jahre später (2018), in which the author tells the woeful life story of her female protagonist – a woeful tale based on an utterly horrific East German childhood.

Klüssendorf’s new work Risse (Fissures) revisits her story. As the title suggests, in this book, as in the previous novels, there is no mending the fissures. It revisits the previous stories in another respect, as well: The collected episodes from the girl’s childhood are taken from the 2004 short story collection Aus allen Himmeln. Klüssendorf has slightly revised the ten stories, arranged them in a chronological order and added comments in italics at the end: Memories, explanations, additions, sometimes even contradictions from the author’s perspective, which reveal something about the reality behind the characters.

Corruptible for a bit of affection

Risse begins with a section, also in italics, in which the first-person narrator remembers her elderly, now deceased mother, whom she had not seen for over 30 years. After the publication of the book of short stories Aus allen Himmeln, a telephone call characterises her mother’s hurtful behaviour. She coldly rebukes her daughter, “You were always a liar, she said, with disgust in her voice.”

Each of the subsequent stories reveals a different facet of human cruelty. The girl lives in an unstable world. Her cold-hearted mother forces both daughters to affirm her fading beauty, she drinks, sends the older girl out to steal. Their father is a suicidal, severe alcoholic and rapist. The world of her peers, for example during the girl’s stays at a home, is also characterised by cruelty. Klüssendorf’s book is a roundelay of abysmal humanity; narcissistic, desperate, malicious, hurtful, “corruptible for a bit of affection.”

Approaching voids

The narrative perspective changes constantly, sometimes even within a chapter. Sometimes it begins from the perspective of the mother, only to switch to the father’s point of view shortly afterwards, before ending in the girl’s first-person narrative. Other characters also have their say; in one chapter, a young teacher in the children’s home remembers the girl, and then we hear from the friend of a boy who many years ago lured several girls to the Baltic Sea to “screw” in the heath.

Klüssendorf’s reflections and skilful literary descriptions of childhood devastation are disheartening and devastating. At the very beginning, the narrator writes that there are no wounds “that haven’t healed, but there are voids that I haven’t dared enter to this day.”