between life and death, past and present, (He) live and remember, everyday life and say goodbye - Judith Hermann's characters oscillate in its third volume of prose "Alice" between five stories and distinct states. As only certain component of life, death is omnipresent. " astronauts thought Alice, we are like astronauts, there is nowhere a halt. "
(alice)
issue in the literature of death is usually complained loudly and raged, and the gray area between the arrival of the message and the beginning of processing - the feeling before the big awareness that a Man will not come back again, is rarely discussed. Judith Hermann protagonist Alice has suffered losses equal to five and does not yet loud. At various stages of her life, the reader comes to her to accompany them in the short sequence of leave-taking - from old love affairs, a fatherly friend, relatives. Precise definitions of the interpersonal relations of stay - just as comprehensive characterizations of the departing one. "Alice" is not a tribute to the dead, but an inventory of what remains, as if one can not die, is a surprising or went voluntarily. Judith Herman writes about the "emptiness centered" around, as she calls them. To feel a vacuum, the deaf and dumb, the strikes as an object which left behind the dull fall on his head - and thereby creates the (almost) impossible to put these words into speechlessness. In Japanese, the state of "betweenness ," the (perceptual) space between people, events, Spaces and times with the term 'ma ' set; as in Buddhism is an attention to transitions developed that will be given a special status. In Hermann's prose expresses this awareness into their typical subtle observations which we have already made their first works "Summer House, Later" and "Nothing but Ghosts" knows. While
. To think that while they had kept at the gas station, the Romanian had looked into the sky, a hawk, an eagle, a buzzard. While Alice pushed the door of the ice chest, Anna had said the word Cornetto, the gas station attendant with his fingers on the counter and Lotte in the car, its profile against the mountain, unmoving behind the tinted windows, and Alice's hand in slow motion in the depth of the ice chest in a cardboard box, ripped full of water ice, raspberry, lemon, and Woodruff, as the name of this ice, had asked the Romanian, Dolomiti had Alice said that since Conrad was gone. In a hot room down the hall with glaring light geflimmert his heart had stopped beating and then, just like that, and not been goodbye, that was it.
echoes they reflect some awkward phrases again and again the surprise about the fact that death does not collapses with a bang in everyday life, but rather a low self-evident creeps into it - an attempt whose unpretentious figure with the size of the lingering feeling to be agreed. One may perceive Judith Hermann's rough language, especially in relation to this issue as a distant, or even emotion - or is it beneficial to feel that it leaves the reader through the often not very tangible meaning of the words enough room for your own thoughts and feelings. To develop a sense of how grief can take many different forms, how big the mistake is really to keep our neighbor invulnerable and can act as minor things that can ultimately mean pain or comfort. In the story Raymond example, Alice is indeed with almost immense pragmatism sorting out the things left behind, but when she finds one of his jackets in the rest of an almond croissant, breaks completely off guard all together around them.
Raymond. Hunger had been. Lively, simple hunger. Bought an almond croissant. He had done so only in a single bakery, nowhere else. [...] As in the past. In winter - the bag was in the pocket of his winter coat next to a glove, where was the other glove out, and Alice had been there? Had she been present when Raymond had bought the almond croissant, he had broken off a piece of her, given or mouth plugged at lunch or afternoon or morning of a day with cold and wind, and while they were side by side gone, pushed Alice's arm in Raymond's arm and her hand into his glove, do you want more, no thanks, and the last piece can fall back into the bag, she twisted, stuck in his jacket pocket. When.
That what breaks one ultimately the neck, the memories of the little details that have accounted for a loved one, runs like a fine hairline crack through the pages, and the knowledge that the road is one of those left behind a fine line , an in-between, which, like the Japanese " nothing "," between "," relationship "," space "or" somewhat can mean. "
Far from a late plane pulled up into the sky, and she thought how Raymond in one of the first nights, they sat together so had said, the sound of an airplane at night would make him sad. Why, Alice had said. Because it is so, than it would have been the last possible plane. For me, Raymond said, and Alice had understood something in it and not something else, and something they had offended. Whenever they saw a plane in the Night, had to Remember.
photo: Jürgen Bauer
judith hermann
"alice"
S. Fischer Verlag, 2009
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