The love among aliens

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Die Liebe unter Aliens is a volume published in 2016 with ten German-language stories by the Hungarian writer Terézia Mora . The work was awarded the Bremen Literature Prize.

Terézia Mora, author of Love Among Aliens at the Leipzig Book Fair 2015

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Fish swims, bird flies

A frühverrenteter car conductor is in the marathon for found his purpose in life and training. When a young man snatches his bag with keys, ID and money from him, the marathon man chases him through the city, loses sight of him and thinks he'll recognize him later. He confronts him and realizes that he has probably mistaken him for his brother. Nevertheless, the young man gives him back part of the money. When the marathon man tells his friend Claus his experience, he suffers a fit of weakness and has to kneel on the floor, "with a sharp, tight heat in his chest" and a rattle.

The love among aliens

The eponymous story of the volume focuses on a young couple in love. Sandy is eighteen and “has nothing at all”, Tim is twenty and is training as a chef. They got to know each other in a rehab facility. Tim has not yet come to terms with his mother's death and Sandy suffers from her parents' lovelessness. The boy works for the landlord Dolf and his wife Ewa. Twenty years ago Dolf reacted to Ewa’s request for foster children with rejection, Ewa hates him. Tim is like a son to Ewa. Once a work assignment takes Tim and Ewa close to the sea, Sandy sits in the car and sets off towards the sea she dreams of. Tim comes later, they meet and hitchhike, they sleep outside. Then suddenly Sandy disappeared. Ewa went to a lake. When Tim tells her on the phone, sobbing, that Sandy is gone, she goes to see him. When Tim and Ewa are unsuccessful in their search for Sandy, Tim does not leave the apartment.

perpetual motion machine

The protagonist of this story is the lonely paramedic Tom, who suffers from the fact that he only sees his eight-year-old son every other weekend. He still hates his mother "like the first day" and wishes he could change that. His childhood best friend, "the other Tom", died suddenly. The news reached him only after the funeral; he arranged a meeting with Katharina, a sister of the deceased. Memories come up in the run-up to this: There was a scandal at the time because the two boys had taken flowers from containers on graves in order to place them on the grave of the dead brother of the other Tom. The two boys had become estranged, and Tom had moved away with his family shortly afterwards. Katharina hardly talks about her brother, Tom goes to the grave of his childhood friend and searches the Internet for his family. But the thought of the next meeting with his son soon takes hold of his thinking again.

Ella Lamb in Mulligar

The protagonist Ella is training to be a photographer. At seventeen she had her son Benji, who lives with her parents; only on weekends does she visit him or bring him to her home. She likes going out with friends and appears tired to work, which has already led to arguments with her boss. Her great, so far unfulfilled wish is to be able to always have her son with her: "... loving him is hardly painful anymore, instead it is much more common to have her own cell out of happiness."

Lost in the forest

A thirty-year-old receptionist lives in a house with his father, who retires early, and his half-sister, three years older, lives with her mother in town. His former girlfriend left him three years ago because “he worked at night and slept during the day, and when he was awake hardly said a word” and was mostly busy “being at the service of his dependent parents”. The young man can only meet his half-sister in secret once a year because he does not dare to act against the parents' wishes. These annual encounters are very important to him. This time there is a car accident and he realizes: “She was just a stranger. [...] I am missing someone who is like me. "

The Portuguese pension

The narrative begins the morning of one day in Mario's life and ends the following night. The Portuguese, in his mid-thirties, became a lawyer for the sake of his parents, but he doesn't want to be one and only pretends to be working in his office in his parents' house. After the death of his parents, he turned the inherited house into a bizarre guesthouse: “Receiving guests and changing bed linen is actually what I love to do best.” Tax debts drive him to try to sell inherited furniture, but this leads to new complications. In the evening he goes to a tango bar with two boarders. His friend, a tour guide, ends the relationship with him in a telephone conversation; their ways of life are incompatible. At the end of the story, he offered a friend the apartment in his house that his girlfriend had previously rented.

Self-portrait with a tea towel

Felka and Felix, a couple of painters, are illegal in Germany. They live on the money Felka earns as a cleaning lady, five euros an hour. Felix only paints self-portraits. They only have contact with two people. Felka's greatest treasure is a given bicycle. Felka, whose perspective is largely followed by the story, has changed her life goal: “I don't care so much about being an artist, but I can't do anything other than painting and cleaning.” Felix is ​​her fixed point: “How should I live without you? “When Felka got pain, she couldn't afford medication or see a doctor. Despite their predicament, the two experience very intense moments together, for example when Felix gives the eponymous self-portrait to Felka as a gift instead of leaving it to his benefactors as planned.

À la research

A Hungarian woman adds a scholarship to an international scholarship . At the beginning of the story, she arrives in London for a research semester. After eight years together, she had revealed to her lover in her homeland that he was her life. He left her. Her friends agreed that you couldn't say something like that to anyone, because she was to blame for the end of the relationship; her decisive mistake was "to have loved him and not to have hidden it". She feels like "sorted out after 8 years". Since then she has been traveling from one foreign scholarship to the next, only going to her home country for Christmas. Instead of doing research in London, she began walking through the city, and soon she was out eight hours a day. Her relationships with old and new acquaintances in London and later also in her home country are only described sporadically; the protagonist's longing for togetherness becomes noticeable (“How about if we lived here together […]”, but is not fulfilled: “… but it is clear that I am disturbing”).

The cheetah question

The former big cat keeper Erasmus Haas has to work on a task in the aptitude test to become an administrative employee candidate, which involves the keeping of a female cheetah by a private person. He gives up prematurely and surrenders to excessive alcohol consumption at home. Parents, childhood and the end of a love appear in his delirium . He survived a hemorrhage only to take care of dogs for three weeks at a sanctuary and then to find out that he had failed the test.

The gift or: The Goddess of Mercy is moving

Masahiko Sato, a Japanologist teaching in Berlin, left his homeland 25 years ago at the request of his wife Vera to accept a professorship in Berlin. In his life he never left the world of educational institutions and never lived alone. When he retires for reasons of age, he initially wanders around aimlessly in his residential area. So far he has only left the house for the way to the university and has hardly noticed his surroundings. In the shop window of a cleaning shop he sees a votive picture of the goddess Kannon from the temple in Nagoya , near which he grew up. The picture arouses in him "encouragement (or rather: hope? Or even: happiness?)". The Japanese woman in the shop awakens his longing, he feels a "magic". He's going to Japan. But the journey, during which he visits the temple and other places of his life in Japan and also his sister, only leads to the realization that his longing is now abstract, no longer so intense, but he is now “lonelier than before”. At a dinner with the family of his future daughter-in-law in Berlin, it turns out that the cleaning woman is the mother of his son's chosen one. It bears the exact name that Masahiko has secretly given her: Ima (Japanese: the gift).

Text analysis

title

Contrary to the assumption triggered by the title of the volume, the stories are not about aliens in the classic sense, but about people. The author announced that the idea for the story book was based on a true story: She was sitting with a friend in the kitchen and suddenly she said: “There is such a light. I can't look at you You look like an alien. ”Mora himself then felt something strange.

It does not describe unimaginable events, but rather circumstances "that seem far too ordinary for anyone to imagine". It's about “the molecular structure of relationships”, “life in the cities and, if necessary, attempts to break out”. Strangeness becomes noticeable, but it does not arise on a distant planet, but in the characters themselves.

Narrative situation

The narrator's perspective is often difficult to determine and is related to the characters' identity crisis. In Fish Swims, Bird Flies, for example, the monologue is interrupted by dialogues without notice and then reverts to an experienced speech .

Mora tells from different perspectives, sometimes as an omniscient, sometimes as a first-person narrator. The author skillfully connects the perspectives of her characters with those of the narrator and thus also with the reader by switching from the first person of the character to the third person of the narrator and vice versa or even once in the second person within a narrative Plural (the narrator and the reader) changes. As a result, the readers lose their distance, can empathize and understand the motives for action.

characters

The figures seem lonely, uprooted and lost. They “find themselves exclusively among the hesitant and hesitant, often enough also among the downward slips and despair of society.” They are constantly looking for opportunities “to escape their here and now physically and mentally. They are nowhere really at home anyway. ”“ It's about strangeness, forlornness, emptiness. And about the sudden breakout of the usual monotony of the day. "

The protagonists are often very alone with their feelings. “They don't analyze themselves, even when they try to get on the track of their lives and their desires - sometimes with a touching awkwardness, always running the highest risk of failure or being thrown a little further out of the world in search of closeness become."

Inken Steen sees the characters as people “who refuse a piece of reality because they don't want to adapt. They have never ceased to experience quiet, blissful moments, and they can bear the fact that the world is absurd and completely normal at the same time. ”This means that“ strategies of self-assertion are available to them ”. You are pursuing a little “utopia of a better or at least a different life”.

These "people at the breaking points of their existence" experience moments of brief happiness, long for love and fail again and again in the face of the demands of everyday life. The stories are filled with melancholy , but also with hope; no final resignation is shown, the characters still have the chance to successfully survive the crisis. Terézia Mora describes her stories as optimistic.

subjects

Mora depicts everyday life without pathos , determined by routines and the small moments of very close happiness in the city, with the neighbors or in nature. The protagonists , who live in precarious circumstances, get into unpredictable situations and are thereby torn from their routine. Sometimes this results in new perspectives, moments of surprise, glimmers of hope, sometimes it ends badly. Marietta Böning describes the characteristics of the stories as the "movements of happiness" from which the characters are torn out again and against which they - sensibly or unreasonably - brace themselves. "Everyone is driven by the desire for change, a hint of happiness."

Loss and separation run through all the narratives. In several narratives, men and women fail to cope with their breakups or divorces.

The image of a society of individuals emerges. According to the jury of the Bremen Literature Prize , the author “equally unfolds the inner workings of her characters into panoramas of the soul” with sobriety and emphasis . Mora shows a society in which “a bell of indifference” has risen over the individual towards their own and others' needs. The only conceivable way out, namely naming what has been buried, does not lead to happiness with Mora. Only one of the characters dares him, the young scientist, whereupon her boyfriend leaves her.

Motifs

The motif of running can be found several times: In the first story, a lonely, elderly man runs after the young thief who has stolen his wallet and key. In another story, in ever longer wanderings through London, a young scientist runs away from the pain that a failed love has caused her. Moving water (river, lake, sea) is used repeatedly as a metaphor for the movement that could come into these stagnant biographies. The reviewer Wiebke Porombka, however, perceives the links between the individual narratives through such motifs as "fragile, more likely: deliberately threadbare" and asks whether the readers construct them in order not to have to surrender to the fatalism of the texts.

language

The language moves close to the characters and leads the reader into their conflicts and turmoil: The sentences are short, there are also colloquial expressions in this "language of clarity and everyday life". The jury of the Bremen Literature Prize certified the author that she writes “with a powerful voice and a sense of rhythm and melody”. “Soberly, without further ado, she accurately tells of the damaged life. Her precise descriptions of the urban milieu including its precarious basement develop an inevitable pull. The ingenious thing about her laconic narrative style is that Mora, so to speak, listens into her characters, but interrupts their stream of consciousness abruptly in order to switch to an external view of their actions. That reinforces the impression of their discontinuity. "

reception

Inken Steen praised the versatility of the author in the drawing of the characters and the design of the narrative perspective . In Tagesspiegel raised Ulrich Rüdenauer the delicacy of language and representation out: "In the stories Terézia Mora's the nuances of the world can be heard." Recognition also found as "accurate" Terézia Mora told the "maimed life." Thomas Kliemann described the stories in the Bonner General-Anzeiger as "subtle, funny, ironic and yet full of empathy ".

Awards

Position in literary history

Oliver von Hove states that Terézia Mora develops characters and images of life in this volume of stories "that are reminiscent of Ödön von Horváth ".

Several reviewers agree that the volume of stories fits in well with Terézia Mora's previous work. On the one hand, this relates to the narrative position, which is difficult to determine in her novel The Only Man on the Continent (2009). On the other hand, a consistent line is seen in the subject matter and the drawing of the figures: Ulrich Rüdenauer spans the arc from the protagonists of the stories to the main character Darius Kopp from The Only Man on the Continent and The Monster , of which it is said: “For about one Minute, Kopp was unable to understand more of the world than what he learned directly from it. ”The reviewer also sees the characters in Love Among Aliens in a“ frenzy of immediacy ”. The themes of being lost and uprooted have dominated the author's work since her debut text Strange Matter (1999). Terézia Mora adhere "with admirable consistency" in her entire work so far to her concern, "as the narrator of the isolation of people in an increasingly impenetrable society as well as their resistance to get on the track."

literature

expenditure

Reviews (selection)

Web links

Quoted edition

  1. ↑ p. 25.
  2. ↑ p. 28.
  3. ↑ p. 46.
  4. ↑ p. 36.
  5. ↑ p. 59.
  6. ↑ p. 86.
  7. ↑ p. 122.
  8. ↑ p. 115.
  9. ↑ p. 127.
  10. ↑ p. 158.
  11. ↑ p. 174.
  12. ↑ p. 172.
  13. ↑ p. 195.
  14. ↑ p. 207.
  15. ↑ p. 210.
  16. ↑ p. 212.
  17. ↑ p. 246.
  18. ↑ p. 241.
  19. ↑ p. 242.
  20. ↑ p. 251.
  21. ↑ p. 261.
  22. ↑ pp. 256 and 265.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h Oliver vom Hove: Cold as the universe. In: diepresse.com. November 4, 2016. Retrieved November 27, 2016 .
  2. ↑ Terézia Mora in conversation with Frank Meyer: Terézia Mora: Love among aliens - how we creep out. In: deutschlandradiokultur.de. October 20, 2016. Retrieved November 26, 2016 .
  3. ↑ a b c Lasse Nehren: Terézia Mora: The love among aliens - kulturnews.de. In: kulturnews.de. September 29, 2016. Retrieved November 26, 2016 .
  4. ↑ a b Paul Jandl: Terézia Mora's new volume of short stories “Love among Aliens” - WORLD. In: welt.de . September 28, 2016. Retrieved November 26, 2016 .
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Björn Hayer: Terézia Mora's collection of stories The love among aliens : Lonely together. In: Spiegel Online . September 27, 2016. Retrieved November 26, 2016 .
  6. ↑ a b c d Inken Steen: The love among aliens - book tip. (No longer available online.) In: radiobremen.de. September 26, 2016, archived from the original on November 23, 2016 ; Retrieved November 26, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.radiobremen.de
  7. ^ A b c d Marietta Böning: Terézia Mora: The leitmotif happiness. In: derstandard.at . October 25, 2016. Retrieved November 26, 2016 .
  8. ↑ Iris Hetscher: Queen of the loners. In: weser-kurier.de. November 24, 2016. Retrieved November 26, 2016 .
  9. ↑ a b c d Ulrich Rüdenauer: New book by Terézia Mora: In the frenzy of immediacy - culture - Tagesspiegel. In: tagesspiegel.de . October 8, 2016, accessed November 26, 2016 .
  10. ^ Roman Bucheli: Tales by Terézia Mora. Man lives alone. In Neue Zürcher Zeitung , October 11, 2016
  11. ↑ a b c d dpn: 2017 Bremen Literature Prize goes to Terézia Mora. In: wn.de. November 20, 2016. Retrieved November 26, 2016 .
  12. ^ A b c Marina Büttner: Terézia Mora: Love among Aliens Luchterhand Verlag. In: literaturleuchtet.wordpress.com. October 11, 2016. Retrieved November 26, 2016 .
  13. ↑ a b c d e f Wiebke Porombka: "The love among aliens": Just no closeness! In: zeit.de . November 3, 2016, accessed November 26, 2016 .
  14. ↑ Thomas Kliemann: Gift tips from the Feuilleton editors - Terézia Mora and love among aliens. In: general-anzeiger-bonn.de. December 6, 2016, accessed December 7, 2016 .
  15. ↑ SWR / SWR best list December / boersenblatt.net. In: boersenblatt.net. Retrieved November 27, 2016 .
  16. ↑ SWR Best List December: Terézia Mora: Love Among Aliens - Program - SWR2. In: swr.de. December 6, 2016, accessed December 7, 2016 .