Sleepless nights, always the same statistics and great anxiety in mind: the loss of control and the hours that go by way too fast. "I'm dying, 2017 will be my year of death," we read in the most poignant book of the spring. Fortunately, Ruth Schweikert has survived her illness, which she traces in her autobiographical work Tage und Hunde.

With the diagnosis of February 9, 2016, everything changes: "I have cancer, breast cancer, boobs , as a friend will say later". It starts the alienation from your own body and a struggle with time. While previously only the writing structured the day of the author, it is now doctor talks, tissue samples and irradiations. Like a demon, the malignant cells take possession of the first-person narrator, declaring all continuities obsolete.

picture alliance / Erwin Elsner

Ruth Schweikert in October 2016

Instead of a linear narrative style, the writer, born in Lörrach in 1965, decided on a very refined aesthetic of the cracks. In addition to cut sentences and misspelled words, the fragmentary text design stands out.

Noticeably, all sorts of philosophical-essayistic digressions mix in with the numerous reflections on the all-dominant cancer. For example about the "navel as a seat of shame", the transparency society, the history of winter tourism or the late-modern station architecture, which shows the acceleration of time. Cheses and episodes and again caesuras, in between also numerous passages of Schweikert's death of her father or close friends - the disease threatens to decompose everything, entire families and even the ability to communicate and thinking.

The author, however, does not give in to depression, but faces the challenge: "While I dance, sing and cry, I suddenly see the cancer in front of me, not outside, an inner counterpart who accompanies me from now on, never again will I be alone I think, and start to shoulder the rucksack and climb the mountain I see in front of me, similar to Mount Kilimanjaro, strangely cheerful. " These are such striking pictures that, despite all the danger, document a rebelliousness in the language.

A form for the chaos of existence

Schweikert will win the fight for the time being and, with her ingenious perseverance, will join a series of authors such as Urs Faes, David Wagner, Kathrin Schmidt and Arno Geiger. They all have discovered the text as a place of negotiation for diseases and have shown how literature in this subject is capable of opening up entirely new spaces of fantasy.

Neither she nor the author living in Switzerland are, as she calls herself, interested in a classical "Proverbs of Persecution". In one of many enriching quotations from literary sources on pathological conditions - from Thomas Bernhard to Jörg Steiner - we encounter the "history of disease as an instrument of survival ", in the sense of finding an order.

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Ruth Schweikert
Days like dogs

Publishing company:

S. FISCHER

Pages:

208

Price:

EUR 20,00

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Writing makes it possible to find a form for the chaos of existence. When writers tell, they create connections and can show potential ways out of the often deficient reality. One of the most beautiful poetological utterances of the text, therefore, is the insight that "the moment of freedom [... ...] lies in the self-forgetting of surrender to a substance that transforms and transforms, taking shape after sentence he also dismisses the author ".

The literarization of cancer thus means at the same time a free writing of its mental and physical catches. It becomes small, a phenomenon of transition that will be followed by something new. For this strong book you have to feel gratitude. It makes hope and is able to squeeze the transience of being a deep moment of pause.