Resi is angry. In the Hand she holds, the cancellation of your apartment. The old building in the centre of Berlin, a 18-year-old lease. Now you need to get out, Resi, her husband and their four children. Because Resi was only sub-tenant, the contract belonged to your old friend Frank. Has provided his notice of termination only with a green stamp. “Note” there. Where has Frank this stamp just? Did he have it extra to customize, not a personal word to his old friend, while he puts you and your family on the road?
The notice is the starting point for a 260-page-long rant, the Anke Stelling sheep can be your protagonist Resi in the novel “in the Dry” hold, for the received it on Thursday the price of the Leipziger book fair in the category of fiction. As Stellings book “Floor-to-ceiling window” of 2015, the novel is the study of a very specific milieu: in his forties, the once with the left Ideal from southern Germany to Berlin, and now in the Prenzlauer Berg district assemblies houses with vanilla-coloured facades for themselves and their families to build.
The middle class existence is pure Performance
Resi was missing at the time, the money to the building project of your friends to do the same. Her parents had not graduated from high school, unlike her friends, she will inherit never. It’s unsuccessful author, her husband Sven of unsuccessful artists. Resi writes her novels on a decrepit laptop in the small chamber in the kitchen, Smoking chain. At noon they eat lunch secretly “under layer”, canned ravioli and instant noodles, the packaging of hiding them at the bottom of the garbage. “I am a Wanderer between the worlds, a mother who hides her poverty,” she writes.
The middle layer of existence is pure Performance. Nevertheless, the fear of not belonging. The plate in Marzahn, the horror picture, the signed Resi. You can also stop in order to shed light on the lives of their Clique in the Prenzlauer Berg critical in their articles and novels. “Well: It managed to. To come here to be, to know his sheep in the Dry at least, each in their own room, in the nursery or at the request of school, in preference to the feeder school for various reasons,“ she writes. “Mies: to call This kind of good life a misery.”
Resi is coming from Parrhesia, the Greek word for freedom of speech, as Anke Stelling in Interviews, has said. Resis the urge to tell the truth, it has cost the friends and the apartment, because the old friends will feel betrayed. However, for Resi, the critical Light of your circumstances is the only way to come to terms with itself. “The world of bread boxes and Doodle lists, account statements, and a compost bucket, advent calendar and lice mails must have a background page, and I’m not going to stop, turn to me, and to swirl it all for you so I even still writes occurring in the life is my only,” she said. “Sounds pathetic? I don’t care“.
Resi wants to mercilessly writes honestly with your daughter
Anke Stelling, a Milieu she knows exactly. Born in 1971, she moved after graduating from Stuttgart back to Berlin, to study at the literature Institute in Leipzig and with the birth of their first child back to Berlin. She got married, two more kids, and with a cooperative house in the Prenzlauer Berg built. In “Floor-to-ceiling window” looked at the life in the community house from the point of view of a, the. While Stelling onset with subtle wit and a slinky be played malaise, enables the outsider perspective in “ducks in a row” more immediate anger in the face of unjust circumstances.
no one has cleared up Stellings protagonist ever about how impossible it is, without the financial backing of a family and to realize themselves. The mother has swallowed her grief always. In the diary, the Resi of your inherited, only eaten one sentence: “too much.” Resi wants to make it better, their oldest daughter, Bea, everything is a tell, and mercilessly honest. Because it hurts, to be able to the daughter and not the longed-for Fjällräven backpack to buy and to stay as the only family within a back home for vacation in the autumn. How is Resi come up with the insane idea to get four children? We know that the are expensive. This “white man” must Resi listen to your girlfriend Frederike, as she complains trips over the expensive classes and Daycare. It has long been internalized.
Anke Stelling takes apart the neo-liberal Mantra, everyone is his own fortune, in her novel, and the middle class stops in major German cities with their hybrid cars and velvet-covered children sit in front of the mirror. It operates while not a conventional Prenzlauer Berg Schwaben-Bashing. Rather, it is the realization that social class plays in spite of idealistic ideas of the youth, of course, have a role to the hypocrisy of the middle class, which wants to gloss over these different conditions. It is also a matter of unrealistic claims, particularly to women, to be the perfect mother, wife, and friend, to achieve in the Job and to be never tired, angry, or hungry. In the end it comes to the self-empowerment of a writer, to take the floor, even if nobody wants to hear what she has to say. “Ducks in a row” is a reading that hurts, and that is precisely why a great contemporary novel.
More about
Anke Stelling and “Floor-to-ceiling Windows” The bullerby-plot, or tract in the madness
Susanna Low –
Anke Stelling: sheep in the Dry. Roman. Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin, 2018. 272 Pages, 22 Euros.
