When Catherine digs out verbally, it looks like this: Her daughters would puke on her, she shouts in their faces, they are poor little toads, ungrateful and stupid. She has constantly made sacrifices for her children, and they should leave her alone with her ridiculous troubles. An uninterrupted lament that the girls endure with a dutiful remorseful face - that's what they've learned by now.
One might think that Violaine Huisman's novel "Die Entflohene" is a contribution to the "Regretting motherhood" debate, the regret of mothers having children. Catherine, however, is a Janus-headed mother: on the one hand, she insults her daughters, on the other hand she overflows her with her overflowing love, and so the girls can not help but excessively love the mother back. For Catherine, who is manic-depressive, motherhood means blessing and cursing at the same time.
Author Huisman uses the book to process her own life and suffering. She is the younger daughter of a sick mother. "Die Entflohene" looks like a breathless roller coaster ride through the psyche of a strikingly beautiful and hard-to-find woman.
There's really nothing that does not over-drive Catherine, who always appears in designer clothes and vamped attitudes. She drives breakneck car, smoking constantly, in the back seat the daughters. Even otherwise, Catherine does a lot to ruin herself. She drinks, takes lots of medication, soothing, painkillers, sleep and stimulants, all together. Just give her her dance school, which she runs with great commitment.
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Violaine Huisman
The Escaped: Roman
Publishing company:
S. FISCHER
Pages:
256
Price:
EUR 22,00
Translated by:
Eva Scharenberg
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Antoine, her husband, a wealthy businessman, is not a real corrective to Catherine. He throws his money out the window, has fun in various affairs - unlike the calm but tiring Paul, Catherine's first husband. All in all, a terribly crazy family, in which there is no everyday routine, although all yearn for normality, especially the daughters.
As in the half-coma
Catherine is a master of self-deception. She leaves Antoine, whom she loves and with whom she constantly argues, because she thinks a new man would rescue her and put her in balance. But the new "type" proves to be a rivet. When Catherine finds out that he is sleeping with his secretary, she is furious.
Finally, she ends up in psychiatry, and when she comes back after a long time, she is pumped full of medication and appears as if in a half-coma. Nevertheless, she takes care of the daughters, assisted by Antoine, somehow. Occasionally she becomes violent towards the elders, as if to show who is in charge.
A fragile boss in great chaos, a modern medea that does not kill its children, but at least destroys their peace of mind. Just as she herself had been more or less destroyed when she was a small child, when she had to spend several years in a hospital, where she was forbidden to visit and that she could not see her mum.
Relentless insights
While the first part of the novel tells Violaine about her childhood memories, in the second part she outlines her mother's biography of how she imagines this excessive life begins shortly after the war, 1947, and ends in 2009 - as we learn in Part Three.
Violaine Huisman, born in 1979, has received several awards for her debut novel. Her book is drastic, breathless, unadorned, develops an almost feverish pull, and sometimes even a breakneck sense of humor - unlike Peter Handke's famous "Wise Wrong," in which the author rather remotely tells of his depressive mother and her suicide.
The repetition of content in Huisman's novel is attributed to the construction of the novel and is forgivable. Sometimes it's a bit of drama that the French author serves us here, like when Catherine, completely in rage, not only flares her dance school and destroys her husband's career, but also repudiates the family puppy.
Nevertheless, "The Escaped" is a strong text because it gives relentless insights into the psyche of a severely damaged woman, struggling for stability - but always crashes.