Wow is it possible that this German author is still considered an insider tip? With her books “Schnell, dein Leben” (2016) and “An ordinary family” (2018), Sylvie Schenk, born in 1944 in Chambéry, France, recently made a name for herself in the autofictional genre as a counterpart to Annie Ernaux, without telling us about her highly individual approach to leave in doubt: fragmentary like memory, skeptical about one’s own resentment, doubting one’s own role in family games and at the desk, precise, clever and full of wit, hard and yet tender. At the beginning of “Maman”, the story of her mother, the narrator does not know whether what she is writing will be a novel, but she knows: “It will be an approximate text.” fills the gaps in tradition and memory with imagination and empathy, the result is a novel after all.
“She was a mute person with blue eyes and a mind that was busy covering up its shortcomings.” Such a sentence about one’s own mother is unheard of, even if the first-person narrator emphasizes so credibly that she “loved her how to love a strange being that belongs to you, a secret that you keep”. But Sylvie Schenk has now opted for plain text, she dispenses with the biographical soft focus, and “secret” is a key word in the novel: that the origin of Renée Gagnieux was in the dark, even for herself, that the riddle surrounding the childhood of five siblings and “hollowed out my mother’s life, a medieval drip torture”, sets the daughter in motion for research and self-questioning: “Mom’s life and my life are intertwined like two differently colored threads of wool in the badly knit sweater of a Penelope who wears waits for itself.”
Renée is this Penelope who waits for herself, for life and in vain. She knits with mechanical devotion, reads trivial literature, if at all, doesn’t care about hiking and skiing. Her husband, not an Odysseus but a dentist from a good family, goes on his tours alone. The couple moved from Lyon to the mountains, to Gap in Hautes-Alpes. The siblings later remember a self-absorbed father and a loveless and indifferent mother who had “no morals” but two iron principles of upbringing: just don’t be late for dinner and just don’t have an illegitimate child ! This corresponds to the comme-il-faut of the bourgeois family, but there is more to Renée: she is an adopted child, which her arrogant parents-in-law let her feel throughout her life. And she doesn’t even know her mother’s name, let alone her father’s.
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