Cemetery whispers

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The story Friedhofsgeflüster by Wanda Schmid is about a girl who develops a disturbed relationship to life and death as a child and only begins to understand the things that shaped her strange childhood and the difficult relationship with the family as a young woman.

The book was published by eFeF-Verlag in Bern in 2000 and has 96 pages. In the same year, the story received the individual work prize from the Swiss Schiller Foundation .

content

Vanessa von Gelblinden grows up in a strangely broken family. Her father is only there on weekends. Vanessa spends most of the time withdrawn in her room and the grandmother has her hands full trying to keep the picture of the family in a good light. Vanessa's only caregivers are the housekeeper Hannah, her grandfather and later Uncle Albert, who tells her a lot about his country trips. The latter, however, still die during Vanessa's young years.

Over time, Vanessa begins to develop a disturbed relationship to life and death. One evening she even strangled her little brother Felix without really understanding what she was doing. At school she finally finds a new friend in the vicar's son Herbert, with whom she can live out her fantasies. She steals in funeral ceremonies, enjoys watching the butcher's work, steals bones from the ossuary with Herbert's help and, towards the end, throws a bloody cockfight .

When the grandmother dies, the parents no longer want Vanessa in the house and send her to a boarding school for girls run by Benedictine women. While she is only slowly getting used to order and discipline, she is slowly growing into a young woman. The father later placed her in a foster family, where she passed the Matura at an elementary school. Vanessa starts to study and has a relationship with a suspicious macho guy. When he becomes pregnant, she breaks up with him, carries the child and gives the nameless child to the mother for adoption, who baptizes it in the name of her murdered son Felix.

Vanessa finishes her studies and then goes on trips to see all the countries that Uncle Albert had previously told her about. She does not return home until 14 years after Felix was born for the funeral of her late father. There she learns from Ada and Hannah that their mother once had a brother named Felix, whose death she never got over. However, Vanessa never talks to Felix about the fact that she is actually his mother.

When Vanessa travels again, she takes Felix with her as a companion. Felix develops affection for Vanessa and when they are back, Vanessa catches Felix cuddling her in her sleep. A short time later, he committed suicide. When Vanessa tells her mother about it, the mother realizes that she has to let go of her son Felix for good and cannot get it back in any way. The two make up.

style

The direct speech is never initiated by quotation marks, but directly involved in the narrative text. The entire text is written in very short, concise sentences, which, in their way, are often reminiscent of briefly noted trains of thought in a diary. So you get the story, especially in the first part, mainly told from Vanessa's point of view and thus get an insight into her thoughts. Only with Vanessa's increasing mental recovery does the outward perspective, which was initially very fixated on Vanessa's view of things, change. It is also noticeable that the names of the various relatives are announced only very hesitantly and that Vanessa is almost exclusively referred to as "The Child" during the description of her childhood and is only mentioned by name later. This underlines the distancing that Vanessa experiences in the family. Only Uncle Albert, with whom she immediately developed a very open and lasting relationship, was immediately introduced by his name.

reception

  • Schweizerische Schillerstiftung: "In her prose firstling, Wanda Schmid demonstrates a masterful feeling for narrative economy by going to the extreme limit of what still needs to be said in order to make people, emotions and events vivid and palpable."
  • The weekly newspaper : "The throbbing, poetic potential, the grotesque humor that flashes again and again in the narrative, awaken memories of the sensually magical novels from South America, but this brilliant burial of a family trauma needed more passionate narrative power, more courageous attention to detail, to pain, to really enchant us. "
  • Neue Zürcher Zeitung : Beatrice Eichmann-Leutenegger considers the author's choppy, paratactic language to be appropriate as long as the protagonist's childhood is described. However, she finds it regrettable that Schmid continued the story into the adulthood of the protagonist. Because, in their opinion, this part of the narrative would be treated in a comparatively superficial manner and would thus be in negative contrast to “the dense and detailed children's scenes”.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. Bibliography Wanda Schmid ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) 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 / home.datacomm.ch
  2. ^ Friedhofsflüster at eFeF Verlag ( Memento from September 6, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
  3. Page no longer available , search in web archives: Friedhofsgeflüster review in WOZ 14/00@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.woz.ch
  4. Review notes on cemetery whispers at perlentaucher.de (NZZ from April 5, 2000)