I'm just lucky
I'm just lucky is a 2001 novel by the German writer and presenter Alexa Hennig von Lange . The novel was awarded the German Youth Literature Prize in 2002.
content
The novel presented in the first- person narrative situation is narrated from the perspective of the 15-year-old protagonist of the book. Lelle lives with her parents and her 16-year-old sister Cotsch in a typical single-family housing estate of the middle class on the outskirts of a German town. The family lives in externally well-ordered circumstances. Lelle can dress according to her wishes, has her own room, she goes to school regularly, albeit listlessly, she has friends, she goes on vacation to Sweden with her parents in the summer.
But the parents have become estranged, their relationship is marked by displeasure, annoyance and arguments about little things. The mother understands the painful process of cutting her daughter's cord as a sign of the decline of her family and believes that she must counteract it with oppressive measures . The father, a choleric prone to violent outbursts, escapes the hysterically charged family life by taking refuge in a senseless ritual of incessant shoing. The older daughter, insecure and lacking self-esteem, blackmailed her parents with suicide threats and Lelle, the fourth in the mentally troubled family quartet, reacts to the families' emotional overload with anorexia . One summer Sunday morning, Lelle is suddenly overcome by the realization: "I am alone!"
The novel now describes the events that occurred over a period of four turbulent days when the ostensibly healthy family life came to a head in a crisis. After an argument with the older daughter, the mother runs out into the street and is run over by the boy next door Arthur, who is not to blame. The next evening, Lelle's older sister, Cotsch, is suddenly nowhere to be found, because another boy from the neighborhood called Antoine, whom Cotsch loves and who disappeared from her life without comment, reappeared. With the help of Arthur, whom her father mistakenly takes to be a prostitute , Lelle finds her injured sister and takes her to the ambulance. When the worst of the entanglements seem to have been resolved during the night, it suddenly looks as if the father has left his family. When he reappears, his family does not accept the declaration that he stood by the neighbors, whose son Antoine crashed into a construction site on the country road without a driver's license.
Lelle, however, is “lucky” in the end: After the rest of the family has left the scene to take care of the wounds that have been inflicted in the past few days, Lelle seeks friend Arthur in the neighboring house and experiences what she has only been about so far dreamed: “Arthur's hand strokes my back. There is the hand that strokes my back. "
expenditure
- I'm just lucky. Reinbek: Verlag Rogner and Bernhard, 2002. ISBN 3499212498