Actress Caroline Peters and her novel “Another Life”

by time news

2024-10-18 14:25:00

Caroline Peters has long left behind her image as a television commissioner. Now the actress has written her first novel. So good that you could immediately imagine a stage adaptation.

The theme of family is inexhaustible! What’s better for a debut? Those who write about families always investigate themselves: their characteristics, their initial advantages or disadvantages, but of course also “the disorder and early suffering”, to use a title by Thomas Mann, who also became known with his novel about a family, his, obviously.

The actress Caroline Peters, who after her brilliant performances at the Schaubühne in Berlin or the Burgtheater in Vienna left behind the somewhat banal image of the television inspector (“Murder with a View”), does not do differently: starts from your background. And she translates it literally like her great colleague from Lübeck. So that everything becomes paradigmatic. Not in the sense of “degradation of a family”, although this aspect also plays a certain role. More like the motto “And the mother is right”. At least his. called Hanna.

A charismatic and chaotic woman, it seems. An intellectual gifted with performative talent, playful, hard-drinking and fond of flirting. Modern in the sense that she wants to be a good mother, but at the same time she ironically, even parodies, the concept of motherhood. And she is also a child of war! I learned the lesson of this generation, which was: You have to show strength. Weakness is hidden. There is no need to be afraid.

Books and plays for parents are currently in demand, think of Didier Eribon and Falk Richter. But it is usually the prejudiced and overlooked people we are introduced to. For this reason alone, this book is refreshing because it finally shows a woman leading a self-determined life as a confident, educated citizen and as a creative person both in terms of writing (with poems) and translating (from Russian). .

His daughters Laura and Lotta tell it

But also to the detriment of the family, of the children, and even of the men, three of whom she approved, one after the other, each with a daughter, and then, when she got tired of domestic banalities, pulling out the plug to pull and remove. At least this is the narrative that prevails in the “post-familial order,” as the narrator defines it. The two eldest daughters, Laura and Lotta, spread the narrative. There is a lot of amusingly depicted friction and rivalry between them and the first-person narrator.

But this is written by the youngest, who was still a child when her mother ran away, so she had to do without it. Yet she is the one who empathetically follows Hanna. The initial spark is his father’s funeral. (Caroline Peters’ father, a well-known neurologist who wrote intelligent books about Hölderlin and Robert Schumann, was buried last year in the old Preetz cemetery, southeast of Kiel.) This funeral sets in motion the rewriting of the Hanna family narrative. The first-person narrator initially returns to Hanna’s funeral twenty years earlier.

Your parents’ secret

And here the author creates a beautiful picture already in the first pages, which in its paradoxical nature probably captures the contradictions of Hanna’s character better than a thousand words. It’s Hanna’s last wish. He wanted to rest as a “message in a bottle filled with his ashes, with a little lead added to keep the bottle at the bottom of the sea.” And don’t swim on the waves. In other words, she wants to remain a secret even if she wants to be discovered.

A great symbol of the eternal inscrutability of one’s parents, especially mothers, who usually hide more than their husbands, who are often much simpler! And how well it seems to capture the essence of Hanna, who sent so many signals before she left that things couldn’t go on like this; who thought she could at least indicate her needs with looks and gestures, but unfortunately never with words, but she was never understood, deciphered, “read”.

The great problem of many relationships, even family ones: the lack of words – is explained almost completely in this gripping 230-page family constellation. It becomes clear that especially where there is a lot of talk, where many anecdotes and stories circulate, in short, where intelligent and cultured people communicate with each other, the most important thing often falls into oblivion: the redeeming word. .

This saving word, which can mean many things, is not even offered by Caroline Peters: in this book everything remains in limbo. But that’s precisely why “Another Life” is so fascinating. It benefits greatly from the author’s sense of characteristic phrases and situations. The theatrical often comes. One can easily imagine a stage adaptation of the novel. Playing the role of Hanna is none other than Caroline Peters. There could not have been a better tribute to his beloved mother. We want to see it!

Carolina Peters: Another life. Rowohlt Berlin, 240 pages, 23 euros

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