Pedants may nag: is this even a novel? Four parts, one each about the father, the mother and the lover, the fourth about the ballet. The two parent texts had previously been published as individual stories in magazines. Now with two more solo texts stuck between the book cover and called a novel. But it’s more in the direction of an autobiography or memoir, a hybrid, oscillating between fiction and non-fiction. But a novel? no way.
Idle, so nitpicking, about a book that launched a confident new voice on the American literary scene more than a quarter century ago, with a debut book that didn’t bother with genre issues – because the author was certain it was the only right one to have found a form for what was to be told here. And what was important to the New York author Sigrid Nunez, born in 1951, was her very peculiar, confused origin story: She wanted to be clear about where she came from and what parental dislocations, hesitations, contingencies, losses and unfulfilled longings she associated with her own Life had to suffer before she could fix her memories properly and establish her own identity. She describes the detours before she found her own way in her mid-forties.
The mother was beautiful, vivacious and dominant, a drama queen not uneducated but full of anger
The nameless first-person narrator owes her life to an adventurous couple. Her father, half Chinese, half Latino from Panama, was named Chang, hispanized his name after illegally immigrating to the United States, worked as a low-paid waiter in Brooklyn, never took vacations, and lived his life in silence. He only talked when he could speak Chinese with his buddies in Chinatown. He only learned rudimentary English, didn’t say anything about himself at home and made himself invisible – a silent riddle that nobody bothered to solve.
As an American occupation soldier, he had made a southern German girl half his age, named Christa, pregnant and brought her to the United States. The couple had two girls, lived on a public housing estate in Brooklyn, and never had enough money. The mother was beautiful, lively and dominant, a drama queen not without education, but full of anger. She struggled with her predicament, was homesick and had no friends. She bickered with her husband, hated America, but spoke the language with some fluency and talked incessantly – of her glorious past in Germany.
Stringent architecture behind apparently loosely assembled narrative segments: Sigrid Nunez.
(Photo: Marion Ettlinger/Aufbau Verlag)
Basically, both parents never arrived in America. They didn’t know where they belonged and desperately clung to their past and their ethnic origins. A pattern that the taxi driver Vadim, the daughter’s Russian lover, was later to refute. She was his language teacher and taught him English; he was a sentimental-brutal macho with a chaotically divided family and informed them, at first only breaking a wheel, about his violent earlier life in Odessa as a petty criminal bandit and pimp. Unlike his lover’s parents, Vadim is driven by the desire for integration, language learning and advancement in America. Wanting to fit in, he works successfully to shake off his past and former self.
When Vadim has mastered the second subjunctive, the narrator ends the affair with him
The narrator has no common language with any of the characters. She does not speak Chinese with Chang, not German with Christa, not Russian with Vadim. Nonetheless, verbal communication is the real theme of the novel, because language is identity. When Vadim has mastered the second subjunctive, the narrator ends the affair with him. Her relationship to the English language, to literary expression, proves to be deeper, more intimate and more passionate than her relationship to people. Seen in this way, her brief masochistic attempt to become a ballerina and to abuse her body to the point of pointe dancing is only a detour to herself. Ballet is a language without words and therefore a mistake for this word-obsessed storyteller.
Sigrid Nunez: A Feather on the Breath of God. Novel. Translated from the English by Anette Grube. Construction, Berlin 2022. 222 pages, 22 euros.
It corresponds to the logic of the publishing house to try to continue the unexpected success of the narrator Sigrid Nunez, who was discovered late. After “The Friend”, her subtle dog friendship novel, won the “National Book Award” in 2018 and was also a big hit with international audiences, the publisher pushed the memoir “Semper Susan”, Nunez’ memories of Susan Sontag, and the terminal care story “What’s wrong with you ” after. So now the debut book from 1995. Anyone who accuses him of only having episodes and no plot to offer would misjudge the stringent architecture behind the seemingly loosely assembled narrative segments. Basically, everything is already laid out here that will make up the originality of the author Sigrid Nunez: the graceful, delicate elegance of the storytelling, the transparent clarity of thinking, observing and remembering. A gem.