The dog alone is a disaster. Isidor is the name of the overweight Labrador with the mangy looking coat that Deborah’s mother found and rescued on the Parisian sidewalk without a collar. Deborah is supposed to walk this abysmal ugly “hound of terror” every evening. “Isidor is my personal forced labour,” the teenager complains. “I’d rather have a slug smoothie.”
That sounds as original as it is exuberant, and large parts of the young adult novel by the French author Marie Pavlenko are written in this tone. Her 17-year-old first-person narrator Deborah is convinced that there is a “catastrophe principle” that brings her nothing but trouble personally. As far as Isidor is concerned, that cannot be denied: He has nibbled on all his shoes, so that Deborah now has to go to school in apple-green rubber boots with frog eyes. She bears this fate with some humor and was also endowed by the author with temperament, empathy and overflowing imagination.
The youngster also needs all of this, because unfortunately the real catastrophes are not long in coming in this story about her Abitur school year.
But the author compensates for this somewhat exaggerated drasticness by leading her heroine, who is capable of intelligent self-reflection, through this developmental novel with a lot of wit and verve.
Bullying by a classmate is hardly worth mentioning. It’s not so easy for Deborah to get over the fact that her best friend has become estranged and infatuated with her new boyfriend to the point of being silly. And the fact that the mother seems more and more absent and alien is just another sign that something is going really wrong: the father has a mistress, as it soon turns out, and the parents are about to separate. Ironically, on New Year’s Eve, the mother then tries to kill herself. When she doesn’t even want to see her daughter in the hospital, that’s “the icing on the cake of all catastrophes”, to finally name the novel. It feels like the “peak of humiliation” for Deborah: “The universe took a big shovel and hit me full in the face with it.”
Admittedly, these are severe catastrophes for a young adult novel, and by no means all of them; the supposedly hopeless love for a classmate who was already in a relationship, shockingly bad school grades and above all the later pregnancy and even abortion of the girlfriend should only be mentioned here. But the author compensates for this somewhat exaggerated drasticness by leading her heroine, who is capable of intelligent self-reflection, through this developmental novel with a lot of wit and verve. If the label weren’t a bit simple and overused, one could describe this atmospherically and linguistically shimmering novel as typically French.
It also fits that the sometimes somewhat lonely schoolgirl has a penchant for great literature and a favorite bookseller who, in proper style, recommends Victor Hugo’s “The Miserable” as a comforting leisure read. These and other allusions sympathetically refer to the always saving power of literature. But they also reflect the educational goals of a Parisian upper class, in whose apartments, which are often expensively decorated on the outside, this novel reveals inner sadness. The school, on the other hand, is described more as a “rabbit hutch” in which almost 40 students have to squeeze into one class. But since this novel is good for a few surprises, there are also attentive teachers at this high school who are on hand to help an overwhelmed teenager.
In the family as well as in love, things are slowly but surely changing for the better, even for the best. Support comes – less alone together – from generous new friends, an unexpectedly generous grandmother and even the Hound of Terror. Because when nothing seems to work in the life of catastrophe Deborah, Isidor comes running panting, presses his stinking snout against her cheek and absolutely cannot be pushed away. Deborah has no choice but to hug him tightly, in the newly acquired knowledge: there really are bigger catastrophes than an ugly dog. (from 14 years)