The craziest things happen when travelling, and apparently this happened to the author too when he was in North Korea some time ago. That Andreas Stichmann is one of the most open people on the planet has been known since his novels “The Big Light” and “The Kidnapping of the Optimist Sydney Seapunk”. But it’s not openness of any kind. On the contrary. He looks for phenomena of connectedness, for ways in which things in common can be created. And so the writer, who was born in Bonn in 1983, found what he was looking for in Pyongyang of all places?
He has transformed his travel experience into a story that oozes with charm and lightness. “A love in Pyongyang” is narrow and concentrated: Claudia Aebischer, who grew up in the GDR, president of the Association of European Libraries, author of three narrative non-fiction books, finally wants to realize her long-delayed “poetry thing”. It is their last delegation trip. The 50-year-old has already been there a few days when she welcomes young Berliners who are “cultural people” who are traveling to the North Korean capital “on a summer night at the beginning of the 21st century” for the opening of a German library.
Of course she enjoys seeing the same panic on the faces of those arriving that she felt on her first trip almost four months ago. Giving up passports and no cell phone reception – even if you’re officially a guest of the authoritarian regime, you can get queasy. “There was a lot of ambition on board,” Claudia thinks, berating herself for “grandma thoughts,” on the North Korean tourist office’s special train. “It was a beautiful and passive generation that let itself be rocked into adulthood. A bit unfunny perhaps. In the reflection of the pane they had something of the dolls lying around.”
Andreas Stichmann, born in 1983, studied at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig and now lives in Berlin.
(Photo: Daniela Imhoff)
The novel tells a thoroughly realistic plot and infiltrates it with romantic motifs. They pop up in a wide variety of places and bloom in a wide variety of ways. Claudia has hardly appraised the passengers – bloggers, journalists, lifestyle columnists – when she sees a woman’s face in the window of the next train, which fascinates her immediately. As luck would have it, it is Sunmi, the interpreter. She should not only translate, but also monitor the group as inconspicuously as possible. Sunmi, married to an old German professor and party official, completes the difficult escort service with sensitivity and grace.
Sunmi knows how to create closeness: accommodating tendencies, celebrating similarities, gradually becoming familiar, cultivating “running gags”, finding nicknames and pet names in order to “celebrate them as an expression of mutual exclusivity.” The strategy works. But not only Claudia falls in love with her, she also falls in love with Claudia. The cheerful celebration of a successful resonance that Stichmann stages between the two women also jumps over linguistically. Sunmi did her doctorate on German Romanticism, her German is a bit old-fashioned, she likes to add an “e” to nouns, she uses the conjunctional adverb “also” like a pause in speech in which she can think. All of this enchants Claudia and inspires the story.
Andreas Stichmann tells the story in an experienced speech and sometimes fades into one consciousness, sometimes into the other. Sometimes he reflects the amorous entanglement of the two in passages in which we hear, for example, the life story of Sunmi, whose mother died giving birth to her sister, in exactly the fairytale tone in which it settled in Claudia’s memory. So it really is a form of “universal poetry” that Stichmann succeeds in in his laconic, delicate novel, a language of love and connectedness that spreads like a mushroom network.
Andreas Stichmann: A love in Pyongyang. Novel. Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg 2022. 156 pages, 20 euros.
While the opening of the library takes place with great peacock posturing, while officials sing the “Praise of Autocracy,” while the group visits the Kims’ mausoleum, and finally Claudia too is prodded into a speech praising the country’s touristic beauties, hops the stream of speech of the two women like rapids alongside. Sometimes they sit in the garden under lanterns, sometimes in the sauna, sometimes they lie in bed and wonder what happened to them. They know exactly what they want: “They decided together that imagination was everything. Not imagination at all! Because imagination sounded like soap bubbles and Walt Disney. imagination, because it sounded serious, exhausting and technical. And German.”
A trip to North Korea is like “traveling back in time to the early 1980s,” Claudia once reflected, feeling a kind of vertigo when she saw the portraits of Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung in her hotel room. Escaping into the stairwell, she feels as if she has left “retro reality” and is seeing “the raw space of real reality” for the first time. In the end, she will dream of saving Sunmi. But she doesn’t want to be saved.
As in all of his books, beginning with the collection of short stories “Jackie in Silber” published in 2008, Stichmann’s third novel astounds with its ability to create atmosphere through gaps. And he shows another quality: a joy of playing combined with stylistic rigor. What Sunmi, the “octopus speaker,” loves about the Chinese market to which she waded across the Yalu as a child, the novel celebrates as a “many-armed” language with gestural power.