DThe title of Iris Wolff's new novel is “Lichtungen”. This word is used only once in 250 pages and rather casually: “In everything there were these dark places where experience ended and memory began. Something remained and something was lost, some at the moment it happened, and no matter how hard you tried, it never reappeared. Memories were scattered across time like clearings. You only came across them by chance and never knew what you would find inside. The most impressive moments, the things that didn't get lost, never belonged to you alone. The fear belonged to you alone. The forgetting. Everything else, thought Lev, only remains present through others.”
Language does not come close to reality
This paragraph is typical – not only for Iris Wolff's language, which is unpretentious and extremely precise, but even more so for her interest in storytelling. All four previous novels by the author, who was born in Sibiu (Hermannstadt), Romania in 1977, from “Half a Stone” (2012) to “Luminous Shadows” and “Pretend it is Raining” to “The Blur of the World” (2020), are largely located in the landscapes of their childhood, which ended with the move to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1985. But these are not simply personal Transylvanian or Banat stories. But rather human experiences that appear in the mirror of Wolff's origins, which are constantly exposed to the risk of forgetting, which she also speaks about in the section quoted at the beginning.
In the characters of her books, this author has never made it a secret, her family's experiences are preserved, but over- and reshaped by her own writing, even if Florentine, the poetic conscience of the multi-award-winning novel “The Blurring of the World” , feels “an uneasiness” towards words that can never be completely resolved. “The vagueness of the statements,” we continue to read there, “unnerved them. No matter how hard she tried, speaking did not come close to the reality of the experience.”
What does that mean for the author? That Iris Wolff goes against this assessment of her own character with her novels. This becomes very clear in “Lichtungen”: It tells the story of Leonhard, called Lev (like the Romanian word for lion), the son of a Romanian-German family, half of which comes from Banat and half from Transylvania. As the only child of his father's second marriage, who died early, Lev is an outsider at home, especially since his mother is not accepted by his father's family because his maternal grandfather has left the country. Before that, however, he had completed a spa stay with his young grandson, during which Lev had a traumatic experience.
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