Origin (Stanišić)

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Origin is the title of a partially autobiographical novel by the German-speaking writer Saša Stanišić from Bosnia and Herzegovina , published by Luchterhand Literaturverlag in 2019 . The book was awarded the German Book Prize of the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels as the best German-language novel of 2019. The novel is colored autobiographically .

content

action

As a first-person narrator, Saša Stanišić writes about his origins, about what it is: origins . The book begins in both the past and the present. The beginning also illustrates another important topic: memory. Kristina Stanišić, Saša's grandmother, suffers from dementia . The author's family history, the description of the genocidal wars in Yugoslavia , the history of integration and the death of the grandmother are interwoven in the novel.

Stanišić was born in 1978 in Višegrad in the then multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia , his hometown now belongs to Bosnia and Herzegovina . He fled to Germany with his parents in 1992 . His father is a Serb from Bosnia, his mother is a Bosniak who was categorized as a Muslim . The fixed from the outside affiliation of the parents to ethnicity and a religion played for the narrator - as well as for the parents - to mark the flight, the Bosnian war , the Stanisic already in his debut novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone processed, in Everyday life hardly matters.

At the age of 14, a new era began for the narrator in another country, he grew up in Heidelberg and experienced his first impressions in a foreign country. His parents were not allowed to and still cannot work in their professions, but only with their qualifications. Her son learned German and tried to integrate himself in the country in which racially motivated attacks took place during the riots in Rostock-Lichtenhagen between August 22 and 26, 1992, the year he arrived .

In the novel, the reader learns about Stanišić's linguistic problems and how he felt as a migrant . He met with other migrants in the Emmertsgrund district in the south of Heidelberg on the premises of an Aral petrol station. He also tells of his first love, of his first German friends, who are very different from the petrol station clique, of his German teacher who advises him to write poems in German and not in his mother tongue (it is precisely this German teacher who discovered his talent for writing).

The book tells of two visits to Oskoruša, a small town in the mountains east of Višegrad: once in 2009 with his grandmother and once in 2018 with his parents. During the first visit, he and his grandmother met a relative named Gavrilo and his wife Marija. Since Oskoruša is the place of origin of the Stanišićs, Gavrilo said that the narrator belongs there because he has his roots there. Grandmother's dementia began in 2009. Since then, she has lived more and more in the past and broke her arm while climbing up an oven. The Stanišićs decided to take Kristina to a nursing home . Stanišić saw his grandmother there for the last time in 2018 during his second stay in Oskoruša.

people

Besides the author and narrator, the main characters of the novel are his parents and grandparents. There are also friends and acquaintances in Germany and Bosnia.

  • Saša Stanišić: He is the narrator of his story.
  • Grandmother Kristina Stanišić: She is demented and loses her memories while Sasa is writing his down.
  • Father: Studied business administration.
  • Mother: political scientist.
  • German teacher: Good teacher who draws attention to important topics.
  • Great-aunt Zagorka: She is a symbol of ambition and hope because at the age of 15 she went out with nothing but her goats to become a cosmonaut.
  • Dr. Home: He is a dentist and Sasa helps out in Germany.
  • Gavrilo: distant relative of Sasa with whom he talks about home.
  • Marija: Gavrilo's wife.
  • Stretoje: Gavrilo's brother.

Real backgrounds

Saša Stanišić (2019)

The real background for the situations described in the novel can be found in the biography of the author Saša Stanišić. He came to Germany as a 14-year-old in 1992 from the disintegrating Yugoslavia.

shape

construction

The work is not written in strict chronological order. Saša Stanišić oscillates between autobiography and novel, between history and research.

The Aachener Zeitung writes: “Stanisic (…) collects memory fragments and connects them narrative. Because memory does not run chronologically, it jumps between places, people, phases of life. How he does that is great storytelling. "

language

The author writes lovingly and poetically, primarily to describe characters and people. He becomes very artful and precise for events and incidents.

Volker Weidermann wrote in Spiegel in 2019 that Stanišić was “(...) an author who could write so precisely, poetically, politically and personally about a piece of cheese or the life of a mouse or traffic policy that one would definitely want to read it voluntarily . "

Narrative form

The novel is mainly told by the author in first person form . The last part, designed in the form of a pen & paper role-playing game , changes from the first-person perspective to the 2nd person singular.

reception

The novel was published by Luchterhand on March 18, 2019. The book received positive reviews from literary critics.

On March 16, 2019, Sandra Kegel wrote for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the descriptions in the novel were a “magical cover letter against oblivion”.

Richard Kämmerlings wrote for Die Welt that the book was "of great importance".

Ijoma Mangold from Zeit Online wrote on March 13, 2019: "Origin is brilliant where it tells of arrival". According to Mangold, Saša Stanišić is a language player who is full of joy about what his sentences can do. Mangold praises the cheeky, touching, reflective and laughable moments in the novel. With this language, Stanišić could conjure up the Yugoslav world of Tito, in which he spent his childhood, as well as the Germany of the noughties in a Brandenburg village, whose tenderly ironic ethnologist he proved in his novel “Before the Festival”.

Honors

The novel received honors:

Awarded the German Book Prize

The jury justified the award as follows:

"" Saša Stanišić is such a good narrator that he even distrusts storytelling. Underneath each sentence of this novel lies the unavailable origin, which is at the same time the driving force behind the story. It is only available as a fragment, as a fiction and as a game with possibilities The author ennobles the reader with his great imagination and releases them from the conventions of chronology, realism and formal clarity. "Hesitation has never told a good story," he lets his first-person say With wit, he contrasts the narratives of the historical jitters with his own stories. "Origin" paints the picture of a present that is told over and over again. A "self-portrait with ancestors" thus becomes the novel of a Europe of life.

- Jury of the German Book Prize 2019
(Note: In fact, the sentence “Hesitation has never told a good story” in the novel is not said by the first-person narrator, but by his grandmother.)

In his speech on the occasion of the awarding of the German Book Prize, Saša Stanišić criticized the decision to award the Nobel Prize for Literature 2019 to Peter Handke , because of his support for Slobodan Milošević and Serbian nationalism. At the same time, he welcomed the award to Olga Tokarczuk . He said he was speaking

“Because I was lucky enough to escape what Peter Handke does not describe in his texts. The fact that I am able to stand in front of you today is thanks to a reality that this person has not appropriated and that extends into his texts from the 1990s. (...) I am so shocked that something like this is awarded. (...) I stand here to celebrate a different literature. I celebrate the other 50 percent. I celebrate Olga Tokarczuk. I am celebrating a literature that is allowed to do everything and tries everything, especially in political struggle, to argue through language. (…) But let me end on a happy note: I am really pleased about your award. I thank the jury. I thank my fantastic publisher. They were always there for me in all things - conversation partner, friend, advisor. Thank you, those present, a lot of strength in the next few days! Don't let yourself get infected - except by good, salable and unsalable literature. "

- Saša Stanišić

Reading trip to the book

Saša Stanišić had to interrupt her reading tour of the book in spring 2020 due to the restrictions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic . It was continued in July 2020.

expenditure

The first issue of Origin was published on March 18, 2019 with a hard cover. A paperback edition is announced for September 14, 2020.

The rights to the book for editions in other languages ​​were granted by the publisher to Bulgaria ( Colibri ), China ( Horizon ), Croatia ( Fraktura ), Denmark ( Batzer ), France ( Stock ), Greece ( Hestia ), Italy ( Keller ), South Korea ( EunHaeng NaMu ), North Macedonia ( Antolog ), Netherlands ( Ambo Anthos ), Norway ( Cappelen Damm ), Romania ( Paralela 45 ), Slovakia ( Ikar ) and Spain ( Angle ).

Audio books

  • Origin , abridged reading with Saša Stanišić, running time: 5 h 39 min, the Hörverlag, 2019, ISBN 978-3-8445-3302-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ [1] Aachen newspaper. Last accessed on May 7, 2020.
  2. ↑ [2] The mirror. Last accessed on May 7, 2020
  3. ↑ [3]. Zeitonline website, accessed on May 7, 2020.
  4. ^ Hans Fallada Prize of the City of Neumünster. City of Neumünster, accessed on April 3, 2020 .
  5. ↑ 2019 award winners. In: German Book Prize . Retrieved April 3, 2020 .
  6. ^ Saša Stanišić - Origins. In: service @ randomhouse.de. Accessed April 3, 2020 (English, German).

Web links