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When Terézia Mora’s first novel Alle Tage (Every Day) was published in the fall of 2004, reviewers at Germany’s major newspapers were ecstatic. By now the reviews have filled two big binders at Luchterhand Verlag, and in the spring of 2005 the novel received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, awarded for the first time that year. The young author had already received the venerable Bachmann Prize for her prose debut Seltsame Materie (Strange Matter) in 1999, and in 2000 she won the Chamisso Prize for transcending language barriers as a Hungarian writing in German. A fourth prize, the Jane Scatcherd Translation Prize (2002) for her translation of Péter Esterházy’s mammoth novel Harmonia Celestis, should be mentioned here as well; these awards reflect the bicultural author’s linguistic and literary background, which also plays a role in the novel (Every Day).
Like the author, its strange hero Abel Nema grows up in an Eastern European country, and like her he emigrates to B., a Western European city (in Mora’s case, Berlin). Like a man possessed he studies ten languages in a language laboratory and soon commands them perfectly, working as a language teacher and translator. Terézia Mora has not learned quite that many languages, but translation is also one of her métiers. Fortunately, however, she has probably never dangled as helplessly as her protagonist does at the very beginning of the novel. All the same, the two seem to share certain cultural affinities. As the author said in an interview: “I come from a depressive-pessimistic culture, a culture of suffering.”
Abel Nema comes from a pessimistic culture too, but his suffering is more a function of subjective, existential distress. Its cause is erotic – he is in love with his school friend Ilia, who rejected him after his confession of love. Abel Nema’s self-image and development remains mired in this traumatic stage, in the status of an object of scorn. He refuses himself. It may be that he is one of “many in the global migration, a displaced person of globalization,” as one reviewer characterized him. But more than that he is the cause of his own suffering, incapable of overcoming his sexual dilemma. A secret hankering for beautiful young boys is the only thrill in this shadowy existence; other things take the place of social and erotic fulfillment: (“The world as a vocabulary word! That is my solace! Why can’t people understand that?”) [transl. I. C.] he asks at one point.
One might suppose that such a wretched character would inevitably result in a “depressive-pessimistic” Entwicklungsroman with a tragic end, reflecting the author’s own tormenting experience. But that is not the case. The author fundamentally distinguishes herself from her main character, contrasting his passivity with a completely different temperament: “I said to myself: Don’t worry, work!”, and as the author of the novel she focuses on a much broader spectrum than the tragedy of the thwarted subject Abel Nema (= Mute Breath): “I started with the nucleus of a story: him, his sham marriage, his stepson, his childhood friend, his parents… And then a lot more people came to me...”
And it is these people who rescue the novel. At one point in the book it is said of Abel Nema’s existential tragedy that he is “a human being without humanity.” The opposite is true of the character in the story the novel tells: Abel Nema exists only through the people around him, through the others’ voices, through their memories and dubious dialogues, through their brutal presence and their dilettantish existence, through their desire – of which he, as the object of desire, is unaware. He exists through the deliriums and turbulences of a social language which stands out in every way from his monologue and his sterile linguistic virtuosity.
On top of the linguistic frenzy of the literary cast, the vivid scenery with its sharply delineated characters and a constantly shifting setting – from a Balkan village to a bourgeois villa – there is Terézia Mora’s linguistic experiment, unhampered by genre norms, but under keen control. “You can do anything in prose…” says the former screenwriter, and fortunately she has the courage to do it. By contrast, the ten languages from the language laboratory have done her hero little good. In one of the novel’s fleeting collages of quotations a news fragment flashes past: “... an eighteen-year-old cut off his tongue and penis on an angel trumpet high...” In a metaphoric sense, this is also the fate of the tragic hero Abel Nema. It would be hard to find more fitting words for the novel than these, from Terézia Mora’s own literary laboratory: an angel trumpet high, clear-eyed.
Martin Zähringer
October 2005
[Translated by Isabel Cole]
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