Nothing but Ghosts, by Judith Hermann, trans Margaret Bettauer Dembo
Restless spirits and footloose women
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Your support makes all the difference.Hermann's protagonists are women in their thirties who are struggling to take hold of their lives after a decade of uneasy adulthood. They live in a world where little is fixed and neither their own nor other people's emotions are predictable. They fall in and out of love with extraordinary speed. Jonina, the Icelander at the heart of "Cold Blue", leaves her lover, Magnus, with no explanation, and returns equally abruptly four months later. Meanwhile, she can date the moment that she falls in love with their German guest, Jonas, to the minute.
Jonina is the only protagonist to remain at home - and it is significant that home is Iceland, "at the end of the earth". All the others are on the move, travelling to Italy, Norway, Czechoslovakia and America. Even the narrator of "Ruth (Girlfriends)", the only story set in Hermann's native Germany, is visiting an actress friend in a small town. She too is an inveterate traveller, reporting trips to New York, London, Morocco and Spain. Hermann does not record the details of journeys; her interest is rather in travel as a metaphor for identity.
The first actual ghost occurs in the title story where, although Ellen remains sceptical, the ghost hunter's description of "people who can't come to terms with life" might equally apply to her. After a chance encounter with a construction worker, she and her partner, Felix, decide to return to Germany and have a child.
The second ghost manifests herself to the unnamed narrator of "Pimp", who is visiting her one-time lover in Czechoslovakia, where he lives in a flat belonging to a recently-dead Chinese woman. It is not the ghostly manifestation that is notable so much as the precision and grace of her actions compared to the messy, unresolved behaviour of the narrator and her friend.
Hermann is a fascinating writer who, in the short story, has found the perfect form for her belief in the "coincidence that causes a change". What Jonina says of Magnus's story of his uncle's taking a ewe to be mounted might serve as a description of the whole collection: it is "a story that's about nothing and yet about everything".
Michael Arditti's 'Unity' is published by Maia Press
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