Adina approaches herself through sensory perception. Her ear perceives the noises in the unfamiliar surroundings, her eye sees the light from the street lamps and focuses on the sparse furnishings in the apartment she has taken refuge in, somewhere on the outskirts of Helsinki. She is alone and no one seems to know where she is hiding.
That she is in shock can be felt from the first line. Only very gradually can she get closer to what caused her panic. There is something dark, violent, buried, and it drove her from Germany to Finland, where she first worked at the bar in a hotel and then lived for a while with her lover Leonides in a wooden house. She cannot return to her mother in the small Czech village in the Giant Mountains.
A characteristic pull sets in on the first pages of Antje Rávik Strubel’s glistening novel “Blue Woman”. The author knows how to fathom the inner state of her heroine, to circle and play around her without ever getting too close. This creates an appealing parallel between her main character’s attempts to reassure herself and Rávik Strubel’s narrative method, because she oscillates between extreme precision – the street lamps are whip lamps with metal shades, the rustling of the leaves comes from a rowan tree, the espresso pot gives off a hissing noise through a nozzle – and a disturbing blurring, something diffuse that arises when dealing with the experiences of her heroine.
The mysterious “blue woman” appears at the port of Helsinki
It goes with the fact that the young woman has several names: Nina, Sala, Adina. And “the last of the Mohicans”, as she called herself in a chat room of her lonely Czech youth. This warrior from James Fenimore Cooper’s famous novel seems to be her very own bastion, her secret reservoir of strength. When she feels it inside, she knows what to do. Above all, changing sex gives her strength.
But there is another storyline. First letters in large print mark this level, which at first only comprises a few sentences and almost looks like a poem interspersed, but then gains space in the course of the novel and drives the rhythm. A first person who shares some qualities with the author, is a writer by profession and is currently on the trail of a story, meets the “blue woman” at the port of Helsinki. A person as mysterious as it is attractive. “You can do anything, but don’t count on me,” she once announced.
This “blue woman”, whose name inevitably suggests paintings by Gabriele Münter such as the “portrait of a young woman”, on the one hand looks like an embodiment of poetry in general. It seems to stimulate the creative powers of the first-person narrator and mark the space of fiction. This fits in with the motto of the poet Inger Christensen, with which the first part of the novel is entitled: “I heard that I am the woman he met on page sixteen.”
An Estonian diplomat is fighting for a new post-Stalinist culture of remembrance
At the same time, there is gradually a growing resemblance to Adina. Whether it is one and the same person remains an approximation, and that too is what makes Rávik Strubel’s prose so dazzling. She effectively merges the different spheres with one another: suddenly the apartment in which the writer is staying looks exactly like Adina’s refuge. The vanishing point of the narrative is that these riddles are not finally resolved, and Adina’s cruel truth seems to be obtained only through fiction. “In the unknowable, we come close to each other,” quotes the blue woman Ilse Aichinger.
The story of the young Czech, who was born in 1984, spans all four parts of the novel. It appears in fragments, has to be laboriously exposed, and some of the events can only be conveyed indirectly. The violence that Adina suffered is all the more clearly communicated. Childhood scenes from the snowy village, where the girl mixed drinks for tourists after school, punctuate the love story with the Estonian diplomat and university professor Leonides, which, as it is called, gives her “breathing space”.
East and West are connected in Leonides, he is a fine spirit and fights for a new culture of remembrance in order to bring the “dark spots” of Stalinism to light. Nevertheless, he lacks the sensorium for the plight of his girlfriend. After the death of her grandfather, a partisan who sawed off the lions’ heads from the table legs in order to free them from their bourgeois ballast, Adina grew up in a women’s household. There were no other young people in their environment.
This is one of the reasons why she felt like “the last of the Mohicans”. Because of this loneliness, she did not seem to be able to cope with the booming customs in reunified Germany, where she landed in 2006. The shy Czech completed a language course in Berlin-Lichtenberg, navigated around a lesbian bohemian and then got an internship on an estate in the Uckermark with an autocratic impresario named Razlav Stein.
Instead of lengthy flashbacks, there are abrupt falls into the past
Stein is obsessed with building a hub for culture in the middle of nowhere, an interface between Eastern and Western Europe, and for that he needs a potent multiplier, someone who can easily get hold of money. This aptly drawn Johann Manfred Bengel, old but undaunted in sneakers and always a gentle “so beautiful, so beautiful” on his lips, obviously does not have his urges under control. When Adina hears his throat clearing at a reception to which she accompanies Leonides in Finland, something starts to slide.
The temporal structure of “Blue Woman” is impressive. Rávik Strubel cleverly uses the epic stylistic device of prediction. One never loses the overview, the linearity is broken up, instead of lengthy flashbacks there are short, abrupt falls into the past. Often the memories seem to invade her heroine rather than allowing her to recall her experiences. The four parts are tied to different main locations, and each time a motto suggests the mood.
Antje Rávik Strubel masters her staff just as confidently as the dramaturgy of her novel. She succeeds in creating memorable figures: the proud Leonides, the manipulative Berlin photographer Rickie, the arrogant Stein, the abysmal villain and finally the luminous figure Kristiina, a sensitive activist and member of parliament who knows how to defend himself.
Finland, it is said, has a Slavic soul in Scandinavian design
The motif is also well composed: Adina is tormented by a pathological thirst, Helsinki is surrounded by water, the main color is blue, knives play an important role, and an underpass through which one can get to the harbor forms the barrier between the various fictional districts . The web of literary references is just as carefully woven – Cooper, Aichinger, Inger Christensen and Joan Didion echo, Adina is reflected in Carson McCullers’ gorgeous heroine Frankie from her developmental novel “The Member of the Wedding”.
And finally, Antje Rávik Strubel provides insights into an idiosyncratic country between worlds, “Slavic soul, Scandinavian design”, as Leonides once describes it. Rávik Strubel’s narrative art is most impressive when it works with cross-fades and double exposures, blurring contours and dissolving the space-time coordinates.
In the final part, Kristiina comes to the fore, and Adina instinctively trusts her, the Finn seems so free and self-determined to her. Kristiina takes them on and wants to go into battle, Leonides also takes her side, but they did not expect the cynicism of power. “Blue Woman” tells a Harvey-Weinstein story and offers a sober inventory of the balance of power, as it was inviolable until a few years ago. Assaults were trivialized, even women – at Rávik Strubel an elegant Swiss woman – react with fatal cloaks: “Whatever has happened; I can only encourage you to get rid of it as quickly as possible,” is her advice. In the end, Adina defends herself with what she has inside. She is the last of the Mohicans.
Antje Rávik Strubel: Blue Woman. S. Fischer Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2021. 429 pages, 24 euros.