What makes writers tangible, what brings them closer to us?

Pablo Neruda, when he remembered: "I fell in bed like a sack of onions on the market"?

Or Ingeborg Bachmann when she complained about the other great writer in her apartment, who was all too committed to the keys when her own sheet was still blank?

They approach with the revelation that they are not only mind but also body.

With the admission of tormenting oneself, of failing in everyday life.

Elena Witzeck

Editor in the features section.

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Terézia Mora is such an author who is almost ingenious, who is viewed with respectful distance.

Actually unthinkable that she has to feed herself day in and day out.

But she does, for example from expired crispbread, and she also has money worries, she writes.

In her childhood, according to Mora, there was always criticism “when I became too visible as myself”.

She becomes visible in her diary and workbook, named “stains” because of her legs, which have turned blue from bicycle falls.

Her trilogy of novels spanned a decade, it was written from 2009 to 2019. She received the German Book Prize for the second volume in 2013. Shortly afterwards, her diary starts, and of course one wonders: Is there really anything else that such a successful writer can do prevent you from writing?

Flora, the wife of Darius Kopp, the protagonist of her trilogy, has already kept a similar notebook. He doesn't find it until after her death. In “Das Ungeheuer” the documents, sketches and translation work are gathered on a separate narrative level. Her creator also wanted to document her life for seven years, in her forties, in her opinion a particularly difficult time for people and writers: "In the middle of life you have no time ... Then you pant the surfaces."

In the end there were five and a half years, which wisely end with the start of the pandemic, a collage of personal observations, poems, letters and quotes, political reflections on their country of origin, Hungary.

What begins in the heyday of blogging and also refers to ambitious writing projects on the Internet develops into a dense stream of consciousness in which the characters from Mora's stories become more and more tangible.

Look through her eyes for a moment

It becomes almost intimate where Mora describes her rushing through an everyday life between immersion and commitment and the failure of stories. “I drink tea, I eat chocolate, I do strenuous gymnastics every day. Basically, I'm still waiting to get roman-fit again. ”Reading trip, commissioned work, then family again, there never really seems to be time for the“ flow ”. One time she searches for names for her characters on the “Fakenamegenerator” website, and one time a character emerges from a conversation with a young woman on the plane.

It is particularly powerful where it dissects the human, the superficiality of communication even among friends, “who are friends precisely because deeper communication would be possible, one moves intellectually and emotionally in the same area - but it just happens rarely". Or wherever she takes a critical look at the literature business and finally complains: Nobody is happy about stories. Everyone just wants the next novel. But how Mora researched, meticulously, empathically, with little consideration for her health, for example when she asked contemporary witnesses about the Jewish slave labor in today's Slovakia, that is the real fascination. Everyone thinks her stories are so sad, she writes. "Just not me. I think they are what life is like. "

In her ruthlessness with herself and with existence, Mora also contributes to her iconization.

At night, in the rain, in the early morning she rides her bike through the city, collects images of the “life on the street” that she needs for her precarious hero, falls, gets up, continues to observe.

You read and sometimes you look up and look around.

And realizes that you are just about to look through her eyes for a moment.

That's how close she came.

Terézia Mora: "Course of the spots".

A diary and work book

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Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Munich 2021. 288 pp., Hardcover, 22, - €.