The child in question is shy.

It feels closer to nature than to people.

It speaks to the chestnuts, the raspberries, the trees.

It ducks before the loud voices that call for it, the rough hands, it makes itself invisible.

"The child knows: It must not become a man." His mother's love is huge, devouring, but it ends where manhood begins and with it the mother's anger about the injustice of female existence, about a life under constraints .

So the child runs into the chicken coop and tries out witch spells for the sex that should one day suit him.

Elena Witzeck

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The story of the child, of growing up near Bern, is part of the quest told in this debut novel, a restless, mindless quest by the narrator Kim for the true meaning behind things on the surface, beginning with his grandmother's illness her growing dementia, and which then circling, groping, leads to the search for one's own body, for what shapes one's own gender and literally makes it bearable.

A book as if written on a matryoshka: one narrative layer falls away again and again, is viewed from all sides and brings the next to light, and Kim de l'Horizon finds his own tone for each one.

A novel at all?

Describing such a book, judging it, is difficult.

Like the child, it refuses to be categorized.

A family novel?

A coming-of-age novel?

A queerness novel?

A novel at all?

First there are the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of childhood, the “floating debris” is the meticulous description of the grandmother in her physical presence, in her helpless assault.

What Kim de l'Horizon, born near Bern, trained in literary writing in Biel and at home in the theater, easily masters, is the transformation of physical superiority into language, into words for the discomfort when one's own body remains alien, one Perception that must be even more extreme for someone who doesn't feel like they belong to any gender.

If an inkling of how that feels is possible, this novel succeeds.

Kim's search leads on to the concealed biographies of two women in the family, one who died early and one who became pregnant early and was imprisoned as a result.

Kim hopes to find out more about herself from the family's secrets and a rapprochement with her grandmother in her illness from the garrulous silence of her grandmother.

It was only much later that the extent of the female suffering was revealed in the family tree of the women in the family, which was compiled by the mother.

Capable, misfit women, women who were killed for their beauty because they were said to spread the plague.

Women accused of having their daughters survive but not their sons because of their fault.

Very subtly and very poetically, the ongoing experience of the parents, grandparents and great-grandparents is told here, about

In each layer of the story, Kim de L'Horizon maintains a rigorous view of the narrative language, which does not require well-worn phrases, and a loving view of the language of the family.

Mother means "sea" in Bern German, a sea of ​​love and a sea to sink into.

And how often this language falls back on the factual!

The Mueti, the Mami, almost all women and all children are things.

And then there is the language of the queer young person in the present of the 21st century, who integrates his own language culture into the stories about his big sea.

Kim de l'Horizon writes "human" instead of "man" and "jemensch" instead of "somebody" and uses the gender star, shaping and bending language during its own metamorphosis.

In a book this physical, there has to be a layer made up of sex.

The sex in "Blood Book" is extensive and vivid.

During the day Kim sits in the library and collects the historical fragments of his past, gathers knowledge about the copper beech that stands in the family garden, and in the evenings and at night Kim sleeps with every man who offers himself.

So the super-concrete and the abstract, the flesh and the spirit mix on the way to knowledge, to the dying grandmother.

One of the highlights of this passage is a suada against arrogance and blaseness in scientific literature.

Only the male nobility understood something about garden design, Kim reads with astonishment in a textbook about copper beeches, reads about it, like the common people, i.e. "citizens and women",

"squeezed" the ornamental trees into small house gardens contrary to their purpose.

And then, in his usual casual tone, he dismisses the "boys-only club" that writes such treatises.

According to Kim de l'Horizon, it took ten years to write the “Blood Book”, and even before publication, the manuscript won the Jürgen Ponto Foundation's literature prize.

Reading this family root work is also work, it requires dedication, but one accepts it without flinching for this stubborn narrator-ego and its language volts, its ability to hold together mental images over hundreds of pages, to transform research material sensitively and mischievously to canon and convention to create without ever losing sight of the tradition of his sea culture.

Kim de l'Horizon: "Blood Book".

Novel.

DuMont Verlag, Cologne 2022. 336 pages, hardcover, €24.