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Sometimes I read books just because of the title. By the way, I read them, sometimes not because of the title, if the title is particularly stupid. But when it comes to finding a title, the publishers always think about what the publishers do and not the authors. And now I have read two books again whose titles I found so beautiful that I had to read them both. One is a debut novel by an Austrian author. Her name is Felicitas Prokopetz, and the book is called: “We sit in the thicket and cry” and was published by Eichborn. I liked the title, more on that in a moment.
And the other is by Mely Kiyak and is called: “Mr. Kiyak thought, now the good part of life begins,” which was published by Hanser. Mr. Kiyak is a small, delicate, fine man, a Turk, an early generation guest worker and his daughter Mely writes about him. He thought that after he had worked hard all his life, the good part of life would come. But the opposite is true. He is worn out, he is tired, his lungs are damaged, probably from toxic fumes in the copper wire factory where he worked. And his daughter now describes his slow aging and death. And she accompanies him. And not just her, but the whole family is traveling, as is common in large families from Turkey. They bring food to the hospital. The hospital is not happy with this at all. But Mely Kiyak is also not happy with the way her father is being treated in the hospital. He doesn't speak German very well. And then some doctor comes and says something and then no one comes for another five hours and the father lies there alone. And if you miss the food tray in the hallway in the morning, you'll have nothing all day.
And she says: Why this coffee drink early in the morning? The hospital is full of people from oriental countries and all these people really need is a samovar in some corner where they can drink a little tea, stand around, comfort each other, tell each other stories. Because stories play a very important role for these types of people from these countries. And so in this beautiful book, Mr. Kiyak repeatedly tells stories from his youth. The duty, her with everything she knows about her father. And she watches it slowly crumble. And that makes her angry, angry, but also funny. And it describes a lot of Turkish and German conditions, what fits together and what doesn't fit together and how we provide our guest workers, to call them that again, well, with pensions and everything else, even in the hospital with health insurance, but not know what their emotional needs are and that they simply have a different mentality than us Germans. I haven't read such a beautiful father, daughter, integration, non-integration book in a long time as this one, which with anger, sorrow and humor makes it clear to us once again how much we owe to our foreign workers, how much to other culture, of different food, of a different way of life. And it's important to remember this again and not to be one of those people with haircuts that we don't even want to see and who have never been abroad in their entire lives and have absolutely no idea what it is, abroad and another world. A beautiful book by Mely Kiyak. "Mr. Kiyak thought that now was the beginning of the good times in life." Well, it wasn't.
And the other book by Felicitas Prokopetz. “We sit in the thicket and cry,” that it is now another mother-daughter story. And this is also about cancer. This mother, Cristina, also has cancer. Valerie, her daughter, is sitting at her bedside and the two have never gotten along well in their entire lives. Valerie also has some worries with her son Tobi, whom she raised alone. He's 16 now, he wants to go out into the world and she can't let him go, while mother Cristina always let her go too early and wasn't able to give enough love. And that's because Cristina is Marta's daughter. And Marta, Valerie's grandmother, never had the desire to have children and be a mother, she completely rejected her first two children, Paul and Cristina, and that shows in Cristina. And the third, Clemens, was difficult, was vicious, was a complicated child. She loved him. His father treated him particularly strictly. As we can imagine, Clemens completely ruined his life with too much mother and too little father's love.
And this book, where Valerie and Cristina are now sitting in the thicket, so to speak, crying about all the missed opportunities. This book takes a walk through a century. It's a bit too many characters, but we're slowly getting the hang of who is who's daughter or son. And it shows us how we are all genetically shaped by our grandparents and great-grandparents, by their experiences, wounds, injuries, how all of this is already within us and what early childhood does to a person for their entire life. Very well written. A debut by Felicitas Prokopetz. “We sit in the thicket and cry.” I always say that books comfort, distract and entertain. But especially in times like these, when the world is upside down and going crazy, I think it's nice to read that other people are experiencing the same crap as us. Of illness, of sorrow. So read carefully. New in 14 days.
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