Who can describe the feelings a mother has for her child? And who can fathom the depth of the pain when that child is lost? “It was a cloudless day in July when Rosie Almanzo lost” – this is how the reader enters a novel that grips him from the first moment, because of course dark forebodings appear immediately. And yet he can breathe a sigh of relief at the end of the short text that the author Lydia Wünsch wrote at the beginning of her novel “Rosie’s Wunderkind”. The five-year-old boy Almanzo laughs, beams and mother and child are happily united.
However, the first few lines already provide a foretaste of what awaits the reader. He experiences a rollercoaster of emotions in the story of “a mother’s love”. Almanzo was diagnosed with autism early on. His speech disappears and the contact becomes fragile. He is lost to his fellow human beings piece by piece. But there are also moments of hope and improvement. He is the omnipresent, beloved “child prodigy”.
“Rosie’s Prodigy” tells the story of a mother’s love.
(Photo: private)
Lydia Wünsch’s debut novel lives on 252 pages from the authenticity of the story, the background to which is pointed out in the blurb. The novel is based on true events and original text passages by the autistic Amanzio Wünsch are woven into it. The author tells the story of her brother, taking all the freedom with the plot that is available to a writer. But it quickly becomes clear that this book was penned by someone who knows what he is writing about. The author always keeps the necessary distance. In this way, it becomes far more than just a family story. It is a story about life with a child with disabilities and even: a novel about a mother’s love for her child.
It is told from the perspective of Almanzo’s mother. In a flashback on the last day before her release from a women’s prison, she looks back on her life in conversation with a fictitious therapist: conflicts with her mother, first love, parties. She has a relationship early on and becomes pregnant. And so begins the great love for her autistic son, which becomes an existential challenge for her.
Questions remain unanswered for a long time
The constellation of the story is clear relatively quickly. But nothing is unwound clichéd. Every mother and father is welcome to join Rosie’s roller coaster ride. Anyone who had a child in kindergarten will find a resonant space in which what they read reverberates. It goes on at school. The autism diagnosis is a blow. Like many relationships formed too early, Rosie’s relationship with her partner Toni develops with difficulty. Toni struggles with Almanzo’s otherness, the couple grows apart. Like Almanzo, Toni disappears without being the bogeyman. Rosie and Almanzo, on the other hand, remain linked by fate.
Lydia Wünsch, born in Munich in 1984, is a member of the Prosathek group of authors and is trained to engage the reader with a clear plot and sober style. Telling the novel in prison flashbacks is a bold move, especially since so much remains open-ended for so long. Why is the mother in prison? What does this have to do with Almanzo? Anyone who accepts this uncertainty will actually find comfort in the end and will be rewarded at a point in time when they no longer expect it. So far, Wünsch has written short stories and obviously has a talent for working up psychologically heavy fare in such a way that the reader grows from reading it.
Lydia Wünsch, Rosie’s child prodigy, About a mother’s love, Diederichs Verlag, Random House, Munich, 2022, hardcover, 18 euros.