The intellectual maternity book in the Anglo-American world is an amazing development curve down. Maggie Nelson’s “Argonauts”, Sheila Hetis “motherhood” and Joan Didions “Blue Nights” a fall to as special works, theoretically and literarily challenging, sometimes strange, and at the same time very entertaining. Just a bit of the state, of the act.
In German-speaking countries, it is believed, however, to write about the Children, is something for women with Blogs, or for subtle authors, whose intellectual strategy for Adaptation to the shock of Parenthood is to formulate an aristocratic contempt for “fuss” (as former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder) and their role in it.
A reference to the fact that this could slowly change, is the Translation of the 18-year-old “A Lifes Work. On Becoming a Mother”. It is to a certain extent, the Urtext of the genre. The British writer Rachel Cusk began working on “life’s work” in 2001, in a time, in the English-speaking, reputable authors, the topic touched so enthusiastic, like a full diaper. She was a year, the mother of a daughter, which had in the first three months of life by screaming – and already pregnant again. It was established also in the past few years, commercially and artistically successful author.
From the scream, Silent and terrible nannies
it was not something that was in line, neither inwards nor outwards. From trying to find from the fragmentation of their identity in the love relationship with your child, and then back to your work, is the Text on the one. On the other hand he is crying, Silent, terrible nannies and the terrible sensation, one had been separated at birth from himself, and the actual I am now restless and lost between the hospital hallways back and forth.
A reviewer of the original described in the book concern as a hazard to human reproduction: When you read, and you get a fear of babies. Here, Cusk writes very carefully, very lovingly and always self-critical about the pleasure and the pain of that conversion process, in which a woman has born, a mother is. A common misconception is that this is the same thing.
Laconically noted in the first Chapter, dealing with the pregnancy: “I personally have to the birth of my child, no happier or more rational expectations than to my murder.” And then writes a few months later, so elegiac about the in addition to-a-toddler-to Sleep: “sleep that announce the end of heat swept over both of us, and I could feel, how we rushed along through the bright constellations of our thoughts. Still on the verge of sleep, I could feel how you, too, over glitter. When I woke up later, lying her head on my belly and her body was nestled to me like a homecoming.” Something must have happened.
if it starts in the Text, to smell too much like milk and diapers, comes an Essay on the history of Pediatrics.
another misconception: That the Be is a linear process. The book will describe “a Phase in which the time was not an orderly sequence of events, but to pass in the circle seemed to be.” For the Text Cusk draws from it the consequence, to change the effect and confusing between the layers of time and perception. She is a sensitive dramaturg – always when it starts in the Text, to smell too much like milk and diapers, comes an Essay on the history of Pediatrics, about D. Lawrence, Proust, Tolstoy (everything is, no mommy’s, of course).
“life’s work” is also the hair-sharp analysis of a culture transformed with the pregnancy, the adult woman back in a care-needy beings. Expectant and young mothers suspected of demonstrating Cusk with a unit from a counselor, a brochure, tips that are in your overheated Care is a furiously funny and depressing at the same time, under the General dumbing-down: “Is an ultrasound examination, you should allow enough time to find in the hospital to the right Department.” Or: “If you can’t sleep at night and your thoughts roll over, should you this Feisty in their identity forcibly suppress it, and use the time to contact your Baby’s record.”
The book is full of force and Humor
read the value of the book is, but also because Cusks will tell you to strength and Humor abounds: your little daughter is crying continuously, in spite of the duration of breastfeeding, the transition to the Cusk is. Or perhaps that is why? “I try to see things from their perspective. If she starts to cry, show my Breasts, as two prison guards, engaged in a fault message, two tumbe, moon-faced henchmen, the approach you and guide you through the administration of a sedative to Silence. Slowly, I suspect that I have is a bureaucratic madness that the Breastfeeding is the punishment for the crying and, consequently, more wines are produced.”
So hard and amusing and to write witty about this mutual capture by the name of Parenting a special Exercise in the Endure of contradictions. But hardly anyone is trained as the intellectual mother. So, to make it clear: This book will not spoil the reproduction, but the one or other prejudice might make an end of.
by Rachel Cusk: a life’s work. The mother to be. Translated from English by Eva Bonné. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2019. 220 p., 30 Fr.
Created: 02.12.2019, 12:08 PM
