OIf she is actually evil, the aspiring writer Arnold asks the student Muna what exactly is evil about her, and finally: “Who do you want to harm?” Muna goes through the people who hurt her in her mind – her alcoholic mother, the cold-hearted aunt, the abusive Scottish guest lecturer – and replies that she can think of people for whom she would wish a “good rub down” or even death. The conflict with them could be solved quite easily: “If they told me they loved me, not only would everything be forgiven, I would even work with all my strength to make their lives as good as possible. “
Things are different for him, says Arnold. Then he attacks her, gropes her and is barely stopped by massive resistance.
Arnold’s victim is the narrator in Terézia Mora’s new novel “Muna or Half of Life”, which was published at the beginning of September and is rightly on the shortlists for two renowned literary awards – it is nominated for the Raabe Prize as well as for the German Book Prize. Muna, who, like the author, was born in 1971, describes, it seems, largely chronologically what happened to her between 1989 and around 2010, between the fall of the Berlin Wall, which she experienced in East Germany, and the late start of her career as a writer. She lives in Berlin, London, Vienna, Berlin again, Saint-Nazaire on the French Atlantic coast, Basel and once again in the German capital. She is a student, nanny, waitress, doctoral student, research assistant on research projects, represents the pregnant press woman at a publishing house, sells in a fashion store, becomes a bookseller and finally an author.
Her biography is similar to that of many others who entered the labor market in the years since reunification; it is characterized by sudden changes of location and job, by material insecurity and by the need to constantly adapt to new colleagues and friends and to leave old ones to lose sight. However, Muna’s narrative has a remarkably consistent thread in her decades-long obsession with the teacher and amateur photographer Magnus. What she reports more or less begins and ends with him, and what happens to her with and through Magnus is the essential theme of the novel.
She loves him, he keeps her at a distance
Muna met him in her East German hometown before she graduated from high school, after she won a writing competition with a poem, sat in on the local newspaper and is now helping out in the editorial department of a cultural magazine that publishes Magnus’ photos. Muna falls in love with, as she writes, an extremely beautiful man who obviously hardly wants to notice her, secretly follows him through the city, sleeps with him and finally loses him when he doesn’t return from a trip in the summer of 1989 like so many people others too. Your letters remain unanswered. Only years later do they see each other again by chance. They begin a relationship that she takes much more seriously than he does, they each keep their own apartments, go on trips and, not only when it comes to family planning, have different opinions about the right level of intensity in this togetherness.
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