2023-08-13 14:36:14
Literature New novel by Maxim Biller
Writing is never so free
Status: 2:36 p.m. | Reading time: 4 minutes
Virtuoso polemicist: writer Maxim Biller
Source: Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images
Maxim Biller actually wanted to stop writing because of the Ukraine war. That was in March 2022. His perhaps last novel is now being published. “Mama Odessa” is a mother-son drama, funny, deep focus and sad.
A month after the start of the Ukraine war, Maxim Biller announced the end of his writing career. “I never want to publish another novel or volume of short stories ever again,” he wrote in March 2022 at the time”. His belief in the world-improving power of literature is gone. The terror of war destroyed any hope that books could make people even a little bit smarter and more human. His entire work is now waste: “Now the Second World War has broken out again in Kiev, Cherson and Odessa – only this time the Russians started it – and all the writing and suffering and scolding by the critics was completely in vain!”
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Now Maxim Biller wouldn’t be Maxim Biller if he hadn’t withdrawn this somewhat pathetic declaration of resignation. So these days his new, completely unpathetic novel “Mama Odessa” is finally appearing. Contrary to what the title suggests, it is not a commentary on the ongoing war, at most a very indirect one. Instead, the thought of the impotence of literature, which can neither promote happiness nor prevent disaster, reappears in the book as a clearly audible, metafictionally tamed background noise. Especially not with people who have dedicated themselves to literature. At best, this makes them even more melancholy and self-referential.
This applies in particular to two members of the three-headed Grinbaum family. In the early 1970s, people emigrated from Odessa to Hamburg. The father actually wanted to go to Israel and the mother actually wanted to stay in the Soviet Union. Son Mischa was a schoolchild when he left the country, decades later he is a successful writer who likes to annoy journalists, especially those who generally forgive him for everything. In addition, he constantly has troubles with the most beautiful women who parade along the sidelines.
Mischa’s mother Aljona, who has been writing all her life, published her first and last novel at the age of almost seventy. Otherwise, Aljona smokes a lot on the living room couch, curses the “Nazi whore” her husband left her for, and listens into her body, where the nerve poison that the KGB once distributed in Grinbaum’s car unfolds its long-term effects. And she writes letters to her son, which she usually does not send, but keeps in a secretary, where they are only found by the addressee after Aljona’s death.
A mother-son drama
There are a few things that seem familiar about this mother-son drama, which is told in a complicated way and oscillates between rivalry, paranoia, laconic tenderness, mutual longing for recognition and literary references (Anna Achmatowa, Philip Roth, Heinrich Böll). As in almost all of his works, Biller, who was born in Prague in 1960 as a child of Russian Jews, once again writes along his own biography.
Likewise, his mother, the geographer and writer Rada Biller, who died in 2019, used her own life as the starting point for her narrative. And those who aim for it will discover similarities with the real Elena Lappin, Biller’s sister and also a writer, in the mysterious Martha, a Hamburg neighbor of the Grinbaums. Basically, this kind of fact-checking is unnecessary. Because although Biller seems to depict some fragments of reality almost unfiltered in the novel, the literary events consistently assert their fictional sovereignty, their own psychological depth of field, their wit and sadness.
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This is mainly due to Mischa, who sometimes appears as a narcissistic, unreliable first-person narrator, sometimes as a cool, omniscient authority or as a Biller self-parody, as a virtuoso annoying polemicist. Once he’s having dinner with a couple of editors and, given the opportunity, rubs them in their faces with relish about how willing they are to hide the crimes of their Nazi grandfathers. “Maybe you can’t understand the other side at all,” says Mischa, “that’s why you’re so unhappy.”
The diagnosis triggers shame in the group. In the novel’s ingeniously constructed cabinet of distorting mirrors, however, the sentence repeatedly turns against Mischa himself. He too can never fully understand the other side, especially that of his mother, and most of the time he doesn’t even want to. That’s actually how it is with the rest of the staff at “Mama Odessa”. And so it is outside of the novel, which is elegantly resigned to this fact. Literature does not appear here with the claim to make people better, but is – quite rightly – self-sufficient.
Maxim pictures: Mama Odessa. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 240 pages, 24 euros
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