Büchner prizewinner
Moving: Terézia Mora’s “Muna or Half of Life”
Terérzia Mora presents a great novel with “Muna or Half of Life”. photo
© Frank Rumpenhorst/dpa
A woman is caught in a toxic relationship trap and thinks it is love. In her new novel, Terézia Mora creates an oppressive psychogram. The book is on the long list for the German Book Prize.
Muna wants to get out of the fug, maybe become a journalist or go to the theater. Everything is in motion during these months: the emergency doctor fetches her mother, Muna completes her Abitur on her own and in between gets to know the man who will determine her life: Magnus, photographer and French teacher, a short amour fou. The Wall falls and the beloved gets lost on a bike tour in Hungary.
With “Muna or Half of Life”, the book prize winner Terézia Mora, who was born in Hungary in 1971 and has lived in Berlin since 1990, is back on the long list for the German Book Prize, which is awarded in mid-October. She already won it in 2013 for “The Monster”.
“Im Vortex” is the name of one of the first chapters of her novel, which finds exactly the right form for the emotional chaos of the first-person narrator: it constantly goes back and forth, time seems to be going crazy. After 70 pages of sky-high euphoria, Muna is completely in love, but her erratic lover has disappeared. Passed by like a storm front.
Muna will have to wait seven years until she finally sees her fateful man again. In the meantime, she begins studying humanities in Berlin and goes to London on a scholarship, where she works as a babysitter for a strange couple. In Vienna, she keeps her head above water with small university jobs. Gradually, the talented Muna established herself in the academic world with the help of mentors.
Her men’s stories are rather unpleasant, but she’s only waiting for one. Magnus finally meets her again by chance at a theater performance in Berlin: the two move in together, but live in different cities most of the time, and both have to survive in the tough competition for the rare jobs.
And the rediscovered Magnus remains aloof, is often harsh, sometimes affectionate. “You shouldn’t always get so worked up about things,” he advises his girlfriend, romantic love is just an illusion. Then there is another argument, a first slap in the face, and alcohol is often involved. Muna continues to glorify her boyfriend, saying he’s like a “walnut tree in the night,” she once said. She blames herself for his violence. If they get better, they believe, the abuse will eventually stop.
Terézia Mora subtly unfolds this fatal thought pattern, uncovering a mechanism that she herself describes as “internalized misogyny” in an interview on the publisher’s website. But her polyphonic, 20-year developmental novel is anything but a clinical experiment. This narrator is an intelligent, fun-loving, humorous woman who nurtures her friendships, loves life, and is ambitious. If only there weren’t this shadow that she keeps conjuring up herself.
In countless unsent letters, in daydreams about Dante and long-distance lover Laura and expectations for the future, Muna fantasizes about their relationship. But then she starts writing short stories to get to the bottom of herself. Suddenly there is a Kafkaesque text about being locked out, and it explains more than any couple psychology. That is fascinating and very skilfully done, and this long-lasting novel is also very readable.
For Muna, writing becomes the key to clarifying her existence, but this only happens in phases. In between, she fantasizes about artificial insemination and a child in order to bring her lover back. To the bitter end, the dark spot Magnus remains decisive for her inner life, even if the real man has only appeared sporadically for a long time. Without false consolation and very laconic, in the spirit of Friedrich Hölderlin’s bitter poem “Half of Life”, Terézia Mora also closes the vicious circle: “I still have half of my life ahead of me. On the statistical average”.
Terézia Mora, Muna or Half of Life, will be published by Lucherhand Verlag on August 30, 441 pages, 25 euros, ISBN: 978-3-630-87496-8.