Power, art, abuse: Annalena McAfee’s novel “Blütenschatten”. – Culture

While the continued sexual abuse of wards in churches, boarding schools and other institutions of this rank still keeps society in suspense, Annalena McAfee uses the example of a victim to illustrate how the shameful behavior can perpetuate itself. The field in which she develops this is the cultural scene, where spiritual or educational authorities do not place their actions under the seal of silence and mystery, but where artists, prince poets and chief thinkers make use of authority and charisma. The way in which the masters are given the privilege to assault and look the other way creates the atmosphere that favors abuse.

Annalena McAfee is a literary and art critic and was the editor of the Guardian and the Financial Times. That she wrote her novel “Blütenschatten“ can be played in this scene, while the same relationships and structures can be found in all otherwise motivated circles, in which taste certainty and interpretive sovereignty are the criteria and often enough charisma, service and intrigue are decisive, is explained by their better knowledge of this milieu. How perfectly she creates stories from the raw material of her experiences, she has already shown in the satirical media novel “Zeilenkrieg”. In the form of a venerable grande dame of reportage and a career-oriented gossip reporter, not only two generations but above all two diverging views of journalism clashed.

The heroine of the new novel is Eve Laing, who as a girl in the 1960s and 1970s wanted to escape the confines of her parents’ home and dreamed of the grandeur that can be experienced in the Tate Gallery and the Royal Albert Hall. With her first boyfriend, she roamed the galleries and museums; a “still half-baked longing” has led her to the art academy.

“Who could resist such an invitation to immortality?”

Now, at sixty, she’s based in London tube and remembers her beginnings as a middle-class daughter who ended up in the hands of a charlatan who, in concentrated form, inflicted the opposite of what she actually dreamed of. In all her uncertainty, she was easy prey for her professor, who saw his sexual appetite as liberal openness and even earned recognition for it. The professor “was nearly four decades older than her. She was an unsuspecting student who reverently attended his nude drawing seminar. He asked her to model him, and who could resist such an invitation to immortality? With a targeted campaign, what would have been called seduction in those days and sexual harassment today, he lured her to his bed. ” Humiliations, such as keeping her waiting in the bathroom while the master lost himself with another admirer, she had docile accepted.

Eve Laing has now reached the peak of her career. Russian magnates are investing in their work, and a retrospective in New York is in preparation. As far as artistic standards are concerned, she has surpassed Mara and Wanda, her two fellow students of yore, with whom she moved to New York in the 1970s, where the persistent optimism of pop and punk culture gave them the necessary momentum. Mara has switched to psychotherapy, Wanda’s immersive and relational art does not recognize Eve, although Wanda is enjoying success around the globe with it.

Eve had always seen herself as a rival of her former friends and had made it her ambition to relax their partners in the most humiliating way possible, to shatter their life plans. Mara’s adopted underage son Theo seduced her and then dropped her, which turned out to be a crash for the boy. Wanda’s partner made her drunk before she seduced him in front of Wanda’s eyes and to the hooting of the exhibition audience in one of Wanda’s exhibitions in which the artist à la Marina Abramović was present. Eve’s marriage to the architect Kristof Axness, which at the time seemed like a happy ending, has been destroyed for good.

In a caring tone, Eve devalues ​​everything that others do

She has just taken another look into the lighted living room, where her successor is already lounging on an armchair, and is now going to her studio with sleeping facilities in an abandoned industrial area in East London. There under her last work lies the bled-out corpse of her 30-year-old lover Luka. He cut his pulse in a scuffle with her after she discovered that he and his feigned love were part of an extensive intrigue with which Wanda is taking revenge for the earlier shame.

In an interview with the Guardian McAfee explained that she enjoyed working out the character Eve Laing, this “rather unpleasant character”, developing from an abused suburban child to a “monster of selfishness”, as the author calls it. And indeed Eve is a special personality, there is idiosyncratic fun in her malice. In a caring tone, Eve devalues ​​everything that others do, she seeks confirmation in dominance, is jealous, gives her deep blows to the left and right and boasts that she has done something good with it. If she is not thanked for this, she feels that it is an affront and takes another low blow. A counterpart would be the figure of mad scientist, the mad scientist who wants to go through with his experiments regardless of loss, who is characterized by megalomania, boastfulness and the compulsive urge to gain control over others.

It is not least thanks to the translators pociao and Roberto de Hollanda that the retold inner monologue of this artist, with its jumps and interruptions, remains exciting. Eve’s ambiguity can be reflected in individual sentences: When in retrospect she finds her “sexual desire at the time, which devoured a large part of her late teenage and early twenties, hectic and stupid”, it sounds rather cocky, as if she was talking about the past. In fact, she is playing down the damage she has done in the life of boy Theo, for example. And nothing has passed, but Eve’s desire is still used by Wanda, who sent her pretty young Luka as a kind of Trojan horse. But Eve also coins that into a triumph. With Lukas Blut as the ideal color, she completes the last part of her picture cycle and experiences it as the fulfillment of her mission. Her ruthless consistency is the consistency of the author in writing a contemporary, realistic horror novel, the cruelty of which is softened if you add a bit of irony to it.