Cherrypicker | Literature  Ten points for passion

Olga Hohmann's meandering puzzle of literary miniatures tells stories from the everyday life of its protagonist, of failure, of sideways and forward movements and the sublimity of opera.

Olga Hohmann, born in 1992, grew up in Berlin and Weimar. She studied theater direction in Berlin and fine arts in Rotterdam. In an interview with Gallerytalk in 2022, she stated that she is constantly "amused by something" in her incessant observations of everyday life and calls most of her "observations and stories rather tragicomic".

They make up a large part of Olga Hohmanns' story In deinem rechten Auge wohnt der Teufel (The devil lives in your right eye): The everyday observations from the protagonist's otherwise not always spectacular life. The narrative follows her life, albeit in a non-chronological fashion, from infancy to the present day when she is probably about the same age as the author.

A kaleidoscopic whole

The protagonist, who is also suspected of having a certain autobiographical relationship with her creator, freely shares whatever is on her mind. Memories, insights, freely associated leaps of thought - all of this artfully blends into a kaleidoscopic whole. The main character seems to be trying to keep her distance, avoiding detailed descriptions of her surroundings, people and even herself. No character has a name, even the closest acquaintances are profanely called the "old friend" or the "new friend", “the father”, or are identified by letters, such as the friends S. and J., or Professor U.
 
Early in the story, the recurring motif of anger, which gives the book its title and is also mentioned in the blurb, is a raw, uncontrollable rage that made her "tiny, red, blue and green" as an infant, and which she sublimates into a tendency towards everyday emotion later in life. In eight sections, called “Acts” (Aufzüge) as in the opera, each with a more or less loose theme, the young woman tells of her childhood, her studies in theater directing, her study trip to southern France in search of her evasive professor U., the artist she admires, the "worst Queen Of The Night in the world" Florence Foster Jenkins and a wealth of chance acquaintances, such as the "Man from Leipzig" or the thieving "Man in the Yellow Cap".

“The Magic Flute”

Tightly narrated paragraphs alternate with short poems and haikus, which, like the sprinkles on an ice cream, have no function for the narrative (or the taste), but lend color and variety and make reading a feverish course. Repetitions of cryptic word dabs or sentence fragments ("Le cri - écrire") or dry jokes ("What kind of tea is hard to swallow? Reality") are important elements of the narrative. The central element, however, is Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, which is constantly present and repeatedly cited as a reference. Its main characters the Queen of the Night, Papageno, Papagena and Tamino accompany her through the years; they are the parallel universe against which she measures her world and her cultural plumb line.

In deinem rechten Auge wohnt der Teufel requires a certain tolerance for the protagonist's mental capers, but it's worth it: the story flows and builds up an inner tension over its 200 pages without a continuous narrative thread or fixed structure, which is mainly due to the unbroken originality and unbridled passion throughout its length. 10 points for originality, 10 points for style and 10 points for passion. At the very least.
 
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Favorite passages:
Le cri – écrire / Der Schrei – das Schreiben 15
Pflanzen: Alter Freund, neuer Freund 35
Schreiben gegen Wutanfälle 47
Am Ende der Wut kommen die Worte, am Ende der Worte kommt die Wut 55
Überall in der Stadt spürt sie die Anwesenheit des Magischen, Mystischen 74
Die Zauberflöte ist eine Maschinenkomödie 86
Die Gastschwester (und Boyfriend) 121
Königin der Nacht Koloratur – Die Farbe der Wut Wut 142
O sagt NO! 202
 

April 2024