2024-03-23 13:40:22
Literary Deniz Ohde
“I walked into Vito like I ran into an open knife”
Status: 23.03.2024 | Reading time: 3 minutes
Writer Deniz Ohde
Source: © Börge Meyn/Suhrkamp Verlag
A Nirvana song about rape doesn’t bode well for Yasemin, the main character in Deniz Ohde’s new novel “I pretend to be asleep.” He tells of a momentous encounter in his youth.
“Aydede!” Yasemin shouts enthusiastically. Aydede is Turkish and means the man in the moon. You quickly sense that there is something sinister about this man in Deniz Ohde’s new novel. Ohde tells the story of Yasemin, called Yase, whom we first meet at the age of 35, before flashbacks tell of her fateful encounter with a young man named Vito. He exerts an inexplicable attraction on the then 14-year-old girl. No wonder, he can play the first four chords of Nirvana’s hit “Polly” on his guitar. But the attraction returns in Yase’s adult life, and now it takes on sinister forms.
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What initially reads like a teenage girl’s coming-of-age story quickly develops into a skillfully woven web of motifs and symbols in which all the actors take on a dual function as character and allegory. For example, Yase’s mother, who receives her daughter in an alcoholic state and half unconscious because the father takes what he needs. In this sense, Yase is born tainted. “There was no innocence that Yasemin could have lost,” it says several times in the text. She was never innocent.
This makes her the clear counterpart to her friend Immacolata, the Immaculate in name alone. While Immacolata can initially be considered a real girl, as the text progresses she transforms into the personification of female innocence. Only the worst can happen to her in this text world. Because in the novel, bodies are something that women have but can never call their own because men constantly claim them. This also applies to Vito, whose name means life, but who embodies Freud’s death instinct in the novel.
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Yase’s body is beautiful, but strangely twisted. Her crooked back becomes a symbol of the social pressure on women: they deform her and then expect her to straighten herself, if necessary with the help of a tight corset. It goes without saying that the men who model the corset on her body make suggestive comments in this novel. It’s about the initially invisible, undetectable violence against women that deforms her psychologically.
When read backwards, every motif in the text turns out to be pregnant with meaning. The friends Lydia and Immacolata seem, in the biblical sense, like prefigurations of Yase. The choice of the Nirvana song, which is about rape, and the adaptation of a quote from Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck do not bode well for Yase. “I walked into Vito like I was walking into an open knife,” says Yasemin. The text, however, may not see any guilt in this, i.e. no “victim blaiming”. Even if one can find this premise problematic, there is still joy in a text that understands its literary craft excellently.
Deniz Ohde: “I pretend to be asleep”. Suhrkamp, 248 pages, 25 euros
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