IIt’s in their late forties that people are, on average, the unhappiest. Economist David G. Blanchflower researched this in a 2020 study in which he explored the relationship between old age and unhappiness. He found out that happiness is distributed in a U-shape over the years of life. The ‘happiness curve’ bottoms out in people who are in their second half of their forties. According to Blanchflower’s study, people in European industrial nations, including Germany, are unhappiest at the age of 47.2.
The protagonists of Jasmin Ramadan’s new novel Goodbye also know this. In it, the writer and columnist tells the story of six people in their mid-forties from Hamburg. The fact that the author, who is in her late forties and lives in Hamburg, lets her former friends and partners, who are almost clichéd overstated, find their way back to each other through two cases of missing persons, seems like the screenplay for a fast-paced, romantic and dramatic comedy that has not yet been made into a film.
Of marriage and tomato growing
Marlene, the “CDU girlfriend”, and Linus are of the model marriage type and are so well attuned to each other that any romance, tension or even tenderness on the paths of child rearing (they have a boy and a girl), retirement provision and everyday management has been lost. The butter-lemon-thyme chicken that Linus wants from Marlene almost every day seems to be a symbol of this: just no experiments. Linus is completely satisfied with this German small family dream, considers his marriage “not a spectacle, but something that gives you peace and quiet”, grows tomatoes, attends medical check-ups twice as often as necessary and wallows in a life without any change or even impermanence.
Marlene is different: She “led her life by preferring to do what she least wanted to do. And that’s exactly how she decided to go with Linus.” Most of the time she was “bored and sometimes angry, but never for too long. Sometimes she even got bored with being angry.” She ends her marriage, tries her hand at a waxing parlor, sleeps with her twenty-year-old Tinder friend Jupiter, and is finally happy. For the couple, however, their forties have a happy ending: when Marlene visits Linus while he is doing voluntary work in a hospice and sees how he is taking care of a chain-smoking cancer patient, she falls in love with her husband for the first time.
Nikki and Mats are less stuffy. Nikki, who prefers greasy snack rotisserie chicken to buttery lemon thyme chicken, feels twice about her 44 years. She feels too unsexy at her age for her long-standing role as the “woman who men risk their marriages for” in a “dirty sexist series”. And before that, she was dumped by her partner Mats for an influencer twenty years her junior who is even “almost quick-witted at times” and fits every cliché that Gen Z elders have: no mind of their own, just replicas of the digital content they consume and always focused on self-portrayal on the internet. But for Nikki, life goes on. She lets Liese, who is also very young, move in with her, who is the opposite of the thoughtless influencer. Instead of continuing to work as a semi-successful actress, Nikki finishes a script she started years ago and ends up even sitting in Cannes because the film adaptation of her work is a success. When Mats, heartbroken with his liaison, turns up on the Côte d’Azur, this circle closes too.
ruptures and reconciliations
And then there’s Leila and Ben. They, too, are initially faced with the ruins of their relationship. The idiosyncratic writer is unwilling to put up with Ben’s whims and infidelities. You’re better off without him. Jasmin Ramadan framed all these webs of failed friendships and relationships, finding oneself and each other with two losses that initially divided the friends and now bring them together. The disappearance of Mats’ brother led to the loss of contact between the men. But when the love affairs of the three men fail, they reconnect and reconcile. Marlene, Nikki and Leila also find each other again: After a friend’s alcoholic ex-husband disappeared, the three women stand by her. At the funeral of the disappeared, the six protagonists comfort their mutual friend and each other. And so this circle closes.
Whether the reader finds himself in one of the clichéd protagonists will depend on the height of the lucky U he is at. For everyone who doesn’t live in a big German city in their forties, they seem rather flat and stereotyped: the bourgeois, the cheating, the psycho or the one with the girlfriend who is too young. The voltage curve is round in itself, possibly too round. But the fact that Ramadan’s stories are stuff for the cinema screens was already shown by her debut “Soul Kitchen”, which served as a prequel to Fatih Akin’s film of the same name. Maybe we’ll see “Goodbye” again on the big screen.
Jasmine Ramadan: “Goodbye”. Novel. Weissbooks, Berlin 2023. 285 pages, hardcover, €24.
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