What does that look like schematically when one of the partners leaves to dock somewhere else? Like two circles with intersection, near which a single circle still hovers, but which still strives towards the two connected circles? Do yoga people in the park form letters with their bodies that can be written down but not yet deciphered? And isn’t the wood veneer that a cone-shaped tree sharpener planes from the trunk and on which the annual rings appear in a very different way than in a cross-section, symbolizes our lives, in which the layers of time and memory overlap?
“Empty Quantity” is the title of the book published by Maro Verlag in Augsburg, which pushes the boundaries of literature as we commonly imagine it. The Mexican-born artist Verónica Gerber Bicecci enhances her text with small drawings: diagrams, sketches, doodles. In many moments she manages to enchant life that cannot simply be put into words.
After the end of a relationship, the first-person narrator hides in her mother’s apartment, the bunker. Here lived the woman who fled from the Argentine military dictatorship to Mexico, who disappeared a while ago – or rather became invisible. A diagram explains how this could happen. The damp walls bubble as the outside world pushes in, and casual sex doesn’t make a new relationship. If you see correctly, the explanatory pictures in this book are also small anchors for a language in which reality constantly wants to magically evaporate.
So special and peculiar is the idea behind Bicecci’s art that it takes a certain amount of daring as a publisher to realize that something is being recorded here that also concerns readers who have not had the experience of the Argentine diaspora in exile in Mexico. If you get involved with the “Empty Crowd” you will discover a melancholy sense of humor in Birgit Weilguny’s translation, which makes some things more bearable.
Ilja Trojanow’s list of the best “World Receivers” awards quarterly books that make the literature of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Arab world known. “Empty Lot” is currently in fourth place. That’s nice and if it weren’t for the small Maro Verlag in Augsburg, we would never have heard about this idiosyncratic, enchanting book.