Terézia Mora’s diary “Spots”. Review – culture


When Darius Kopp finds her laptop after his wife’s suicide, he discovers a large number of private files. Documents with names like “Gnozis” or “Schrott”. What sounds cryptic at first turns out to be an exact transcription of the past. Flora kept a diary all her life. Small sketches and notes in which she investigates her depressive illness as well as the authoritarian structure of society in Hungary, where she grew up. Sometimes the entries only consist of a few words, record dream images or list something, describe scenes from everyday life or record a quote from a book.

The writer Terézia Mora may have taken her own figure as a model. In any case, like Flora, the secret center of her three novels about the IT expert Darius Kopp, she kept a diary for a long period of time. A diary that is at the same time a workbook and owes itself to a specific project: writing down your own life for seven years. More precisely: the time from 43 to 50, “the toughest ‘intermediate time’ for a person and a writer,” as Mora notes.

Fortunately, she has not stayed true to her plan. The seven years have become five and a half, the last entry is from March 2020, so there was no risk that the book could end up in a corona diary after all. She starts it off as a public blog and then continues it in the form of closed posts. It is really a transcript, but not only of one’s own life, but also of everyday social life, which Mora observes closely and whose structures she tries to analyze. So it is not surprising that she once wrote about “being a seismograph”, which characterizes her life as a writer, and adds in a later entry: “We are continuing to monitor the situation.”

The game: Always write down the fifth sentence on the 23rd page of a book

What Terézia Mora makes of her observations could quite banally be called everyday sketches. In the best of cases, however, it transforms the details into picture-perfect miniatures. Here the movement of a white construction plan releases memories of moments of happiness from childhood, there the lined-up illustrated books in the display of a bookstore become a tableau of imagination: “The flower pots. The two men in the coats between the pipes. The elbow and the armpits . The surreal worlds. The neon and that Protect me from what I want. The red hat. The Beckmann drawings, anyway. And the hunched body in the lower right. “

In fact, not only can you read the details of the display – you can see them too. Mora sprinkled photographs of some motifs between the sentences, often snapshots, of urban atmospheres or absurd scenes such as the sign of a fire service entrance in front of a large undergrowth. In general, there is juggling with different media and types of text, ranging from letters to lists to translations of poetry – and which Mora uses to sort out the many splinters of her book a little. This also includes the game of not just noting down reading experiences, but always the fifth sentence on the 23rd page of a book, a game that carries over the length of the volume mainly because Mora enjoys the process time and time again undermines.

You can find a lot of literary gossip in this diary and workbook and lamentations about the everyday life of a writer. Week-long reading trips, commissioned work, unmotivated organizers, the constant struggle for at least halfway adequate payment – things that keep the author from doing what it’s actually about: writing. In their abundance and in their similarity, these lament passages are not necessarily among the most stimulating in the book. Mora is far stronger where she makes it clear by how many threads life and writing are interwoven and what necessity writing has as a means of survival: “Writing is also stumbling, but in the end the result is more visible, more presentable, more usable, also for others. Just because it materialized, so I just can’t any Write a book, it has to be one that builds on my core. “

Terézia Mora: The course of the spots. A diary and work book. Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Munich 2021. 286 pages, 22 euros.

Christoph Meckel once said that a text can absorb anything that exists. The prerequisite, however, is that what has been recorded is “transformed by the author”. Terézia Mora proceeds in a similar way in her literary work. Using many examples, she shows how writing feeds on everyday observations. A grocery store across from a cemetery is included in the volume of stories “Love Among Aliens”, as is a red gulf (which is later deleted). Elsewhere, a screaming school class is suitable for the backdrop of a text. Even an annoying visit to the authorities can become important and in the end, in a completely different context, of course, find yourself as part of the novel “Auf dem Seil”.

Mora calls her inclination a “déformation professional” at one point. You only save what you think can be used for writing, simply forget other things. This can be used as an excuse if you don’t recognize people on the street, says Mora. But it’s also lucky for this book. Because you can read precise brief analyzes of the political situation in Hungary or notes on the Nazi history in Mora’s birthplace Sopron. Entries on the connection between body and language. Plans for what the next books might look like. And sentences in which Mora states that the source of her fear is Hungary and that fear is her “inheritance”. It is no coincidence that the title of the book is “Spots”. It’s the bruises after falling on a bike. The course of the spots is always a course of pain in Terézia Mora.

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