Admittedly, the narrator in Tanja Maljartschuk's new novel is a psycho case. Your house barely leaves. Your therapist only watches you through Skype. Why does she even tell this story of Vyacheslav Lypynskyi, an intellectual who fought for Ukrainian independence sometime around 1918? Her answer: "Irrational Stubbornness".
In the first few pages, Maljartschuk's book seems more like a time novel that plays through the life story of two almost alien characters. She, that is a nameless writer: After several failed relationships, she searches for the meaning of life, is afraid of death, their own "disappearance without a trace". Vyacheslav Lypynskyj does not know them himself: After the February Revolution, he fought as a diplomat from the Polish noble family for a new monarchy in Ukraine.
The narrator encounters him only by accident, about a newspaper message from 1931. "Vyacheslav Lypynskyj is dead." In her story, she sees a chance to "relive my story". The only thing that connects the two figures at first glance, these are respiratory problems: Lypynskyj suffers from tuberculosis. The narrator feels in panic attacks the "heart in the neck".
Memory, the "guessing of the past"
But it is precisely this apparent distance and strangeness that make Tanja Maljartschuk's characters so special: her novel, Blue Whale of Remembrance, is about how history is created - and how people are forgotten. The characters breathe another piece of their own lives with each breath. Time "crushes them to a uniform mass like a gigantic blue whale does the microscopic plankton". In this mass, this "black pond", Maljartschuk seeks scraps of memory - and developed a stringent concept for her book.
DPA
Tanja Maljartschuk at the literary competition for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize 2018
Tanja Maljartschuk's winning text for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize 2018 was all about how people can lose their identity. In the story "Frogs in the Sea" Petro tears his passport and throws him into the Danube. What remains of him is just his first name - and the memory. In Maljartschuk's new novel, even the only one is "guessing the past". The protagonist searches for fragments of history, condensing them into solid bodies.
Lypynskyj becomes a man in the "always same dressing gown", who had "prepared for death from childhood". Whether that's true, can hardly be checked. The narrator describes herself on the first pages as a "manipulator of words and ideas". Fiction and story are linked in the novel. Malyarchuk reruns historical moments of Ukraine in episodes: the Ukrainian Declaration of Independence, the storm of the Red Army, the collapse of the newly established Cossack state. But in the novel, this is nothing but a dead skeleton.
The story becomes revived only when Maljarchuk combines these episodes with sensual details: the sweet taste of "Pampushki", Ukrainian donut. The smell of wind at five o'clock in the morning, fresh like morning soap.
History as a repetition of common sensations
Through these familiar-looking experiences Maljarchuk not only creates tactile points of contact between the two main characters. It also makes clear why the narrator can reconstruct the history of Lypynskyj at all: sensual experiences are repeated as well as the breathing rhythm of the characters. That Malyarchuk elaborates them in such detail makes perfect sense.
As Lypynskyj in a horse show crashes from his horse and loses his consciousness, he can even be supernatural in the novel: The sunbeams "pierced him like arrows". Lypynskyj stops breathing, his body dies for a moment. At this moment seemingly motionless details are suddenly perceived as in time-lapse: "The apricot trees rustled, in the moist shade of the pristine meadow herbs ripened the wild berries."
DISPLAY
Tanya Malyarchuk:
Blue whale of memory
Translation: Maria Weissenböck
Kiepenheuer & Witsch; 288 pages; 22, - Euro (bound)
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Without this concept, the novel would probably not always be sensitive to the German audience. Originally the novel is written in Ukrainian, published in 2016, two years after the outbreak of the conflict in eastern Ukraine. But the political dimension of identity plays a rather subordinate role in the novel. The experience of history as a repetition of shared sensations creates a connection to the reader: "Those affected will imitate life for a long time without knowing that the green branch grows on the withered tree."