“In the summer of 2018, I went on a trip to the USA with my mother.” This sober, a bit boring, completely undramatic first movement covers something like a hard-to-extinguish conflagration, because it contains at least four components that react with each other below the surface: summer, mother, me and USA. The summer of 2018, those were infinitely hot weeks of a pre-pandemic year, in which one looked for shadow all over the northern hemisphere.
In this summer heat, the writer Matthias Nawrat lets a somewhat burly writer travel along the American east coast with his dynamic mother – a literary road trip on which the first-person narrator takes the country and people from New York City to the coastal town of Camden, Maine, with small, portrayed precise sketches while observing oneself as part of a family story that is supposedly undramatic, but full of pitfalls.
“But I can’t be the only one who keeps telling something”
More precisely, the journey increases to an initially restrained, then increasingly clear ping-pong of passive-aggressive signals – whereby such an intensification of the mixture of “exhausting, but also beautiful” that characterizes this mother-son journey would not do justice. The writer not only records his anger, but also his joy when the mother likes something; he lets himself be infected by her youthful enthusiasm, is afraid of her pragmatism or imagines her youth in Poland. At the same time, however, the maternal reproach and complaint mechanism is at work. “For a number of years she has kept claiming that neither my brother nor I liked spending time with her, that none of us really liked her.” This is another reason why this journey is being undertaken, as a counter-evidence to a certain extent. But the old snap mechanisms – she the victim, he the blackmailed – can of course not be levered out so easily. You go around in circles, he counters at some point, but of course that also applies to himself.
From the beginning, special circumstances determine the emotional course: The son had actually only thought of a week, but he is “tricked” by the mother and therefore the time together doubles; after a week in New York, the two rent a car to drive to the coast of the state of Maine. In addition, the mother injured herself on the first day: she stumbled over a stool in the Airbnb apartment and fell on her face, her nose seemed broken. In the Brooklyn hospital, she received first aid, but nothing more happened, and because the patient mother apparently coped well with the physical pain, the vacation continued, accompanied by sympathetic to genuinely concerned inquiries from complete strangers, whether in the New York U Train or travel in New Hampshire.
Matthias Nawrat: Trip to Maine. Novel. Rowohlt Verlag: Hamburg 2021. 218 pages, 22 euros.
The motel owner, the cashier, the artist Mike or the black surgeon Maurice, with whom they live in Camden: They are of course chance acquaintances, but together they result in an all-American everyday panorama that has a long-lasting effect, precisely because Matthias Nawrat all encounters as incidentally and from the Outlined corner of the eye. This sensor for atmospheric subtleties and supposedly minor things also has an effect on the perception of the surroundings: “A fleeting metallic hammering reached my ear, then the sound of an engine revving up from one of the gardens.” How such subliminal noises gradually turn up can also be seen in the mother-son dialogues – and thus back to passive-aggressive ping-pong. He seems in a bad mood and never tells what worries him, says his mother. “I have to concentrate on driving,” replies the son. You: “But I can’t be the only one who keeps talking.” He: “I have nothing to tell right now.”
The “Reise nach Maine” (Journey to Maine), which disguises itself as a novel, stages such continuous loops full of lacony and comedy. Nawrat, who, like his first-person narrator, has Polish parents and grew up in Bamberg, balances this special form of sensitivity, which is both melancholy and eccentric, in his novels, most recently in “The Sad Guest” (2019 ) – a novel about a sensitive writer who describes the city and other seemingly lost people during the attack on Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz.
In “Journey to Maine” there is a moment when the son ponders the smell of the mother’s hand cream that arouses defensiveness (“maybe even disgust”) as well as compassion and affection in him. In her first years in Germany, the mother worked in a laundry and in a nursing home, and since then she has been allergic to some soaps. Even now, in retirement, she rubs her hands several times a day, which makes the skin look well-groomed and shine, as the son registers. But no matter how well-groomed your hands are now: You have to think of almost archaically battered mother’s hands, of the whole terror of sacrifice, duty and care. This cycle, which Nawrat examines with succinct finesse, also has its tragicomic sides, for example when the son’s pajamas are folded back on the pillow. The carousel keeps turning, the writer knows that and sits down in the café to write – fortunately.