Autumn is coming, and Mother feels strange: "It's not a cold. Something is wrong with her. Mother becomes a mystery to herself." Mother is the main and basically the only character in Katharina Mevissen's second book "Mother's Voice Break", which tells about a year in the protagonist's life on just 112 pages and in short chapters. It used to have many names, but all that has remained is its functional designation. And that's despite the fact that motherhood doesn't really suit motherhood. Not before, and now that the children are out of the house and far away, only their phone call on Mother's Day reminds us that there used to be this other life. Now Mother is about to transform, she loses her teeth and for a while also her voice. Mother is getting older.
Anna Vollmer
Editor in the feuilleton.
- Follow I follow
This is not a topic that most people like to deal with. Therefore, it should be said right away that "Mother's Voice Break" is not a depressing book about old age. Nor is it one whose "plot" is quickly outlined. Mevissen's text thrives on his tone and images. He begins like this: "Mother knows nine languages, but she doesn't talk to anyone anymore. Sometimes she talks to the central heating, the trees and the bread, insults her teeth or the radio. Otherwise, Mother is silent. She doesn't have enough of a voice."
Katharina Mevissen, born in 1991, is working on a doctorate in literary orality at the Free University of Berlin. This influence can be seen in her text, which is not to say that it has become an academic project. When writers deal with literature professionally, it can sometimes lead to their texts appearing clever but not very intuitive, to impressing you in terms of craftsmanship but not touching you. This is not the case with "Mother's Voice Break". Already after the first few pages you are in the middle of mother's world, you almost seem to feel the physical changes she is going through.
The Mother's Nine Languages
Nevertheless, you can tell that Mevissen doesn't just have written storytelling or seemingly conventional forms of communication in mind. In terms of content and also in terms of form. The nine languages that mother no longer speaks with anyone are different than one would expect: Mother speaks the language of the house, the child or the garden, for example. The text itself is so rhythmic, so sensual, that you want to hear or read it out loud. Mevissen, like many oral texts, works with recurring images and motifs. The heating, the trees, the radio and especially the teeth, which are already mentioned in the first sentences, come up again and again in the course of the book. The latter not only within the narrative, but also in the form of seven illustrations contributed by the artist Katharina Greeven.
Many of these images and motifs are quite well-known, but are repeatedly broken in "Mother's Voice Break". This is already true for the main character: one has often heard of aging women who, now childless and in a house that is far too big, can no longer cope with life, lonely. In many other novels, films that tell of old age and autumn, however, a story of decline would now begin, a melancholic narrative in muted colors. Mother, on the other hand, knows how to help herself: when autumn makes her sad, she throws salt into the bath water and dreams of the sea. Or she masturbates to stock market prices. Thus, although the book is about aging and melancholy, it still puts you in a good mood. Because even the title reveals that it doesn't end with Mutter, but only continues in a different form: like after the voice break. Or after winter.