The cover picture shows a jump into the water, the title is "Unpredictable": A new start in the book business cannot be staged more meaningfully.
A new publishing company is starting out with great ecological and content-related resolutions, which the editorial explains to us.
He wants to bring books that touch people and “have the power to change something” into the world, and without leaving any residue.
This is how the founders Lars Classen, former program manager at dtv, and Flo Keck explain their project to us: you can safely put your books in the ground, there they would turn to earth without any pollutant residues.
However, as Claßen adds for safety, composting is not the desirable route.
Books by Kjona Verlag are also produced for reading and want to convince as media “of deceleration, empathy building and enlightenment”.
And as the opening title for this appealing programme, the publisher has certainly not chosen the contemporary novel by the American author Dana Spiotta, which was first published in 2021, without a deeper meaning.
“Unpredictable” also tells of a great new beginning.
The middle-class heroine named Sam is in her early fifties and radically changes her life from one day to the next.
In Syracuse, New York State, she lives a life that is largely free of shocks: her wealth is secure, her husband is knowledgeable, her daughter is pubertal and headstrong, but she is ambitious and successful in school.
Suddenly, for reasons she doesn't quite know herself, Sam decides to buy a once magnificent but now derelict bungalow in a seedy downtown area.
Sam feels drawn to it almost magically: “She would move into the ramshackle house downtown, the unloved, forgotten house overlooking the unloved, forgotten city.
Why?
Because only she saw his beauty.
It was made for her.
She couldn't - couldn't - resist.
A yes to this version of her life meant a no to the other.”
Unusual role in life
Rather casually, the heroine remarks that this impulsive house purchase also means that she is leaving her husband.
So she fits into the self-chosen existence, which she has created both unplanned and untrained, with difficulty.
She looks for new alliances without completely leaving the old ones behind and rehearses the unfamiliar role in life without knowing the script up to now.
All sorts of complications follow from this, which the novel unfolds in some detail: Sam tries to connect with the new, predominantly black neighborhood;
Sam gets involved with a feminist chat and action group;
Sam desperately keeps in touch with her daughter, who increasingly pursues her own life;
Sam worries about her happily aging but terminally ill mother;
Sam faces intruders like brutal police violence;
Sam is haunted by the dark side of history while working at the memorial to an early women's rights activist.
It is probably the mother-daughter relationship that forms something like the center of the story.
In the narrative style, which remains closely tied to Sam's world of experience, the perspective changes three times, so that we can temporarily follow what is happening from the daughter's point of view and notice how the upheavals in both lifestyles are reciprocal.
Because to the same extent that Sam tries to free herself from conventional bonds, the sixteen-year-old daughter goes her own way and experiments with sexual bonds for the first time, which her mother does not yet trust her and possibly does not really begrudge.
The growing up of the daughter - coming of age - contrasts with the aging of the mother - coming of middle age - and actually provides strong conflict and narrative material.
But this promising narrative center keeps getting lost because the novel wants to tell us so much more at the same time - about American society after the Trump election, about Syracuse and its history with a special focus on architecture and socio-utopian communities in the 19th century , of medical diagnoses and how we deal with them, of racism, violence and eugenics, religious promises of salvation, injustice and other such questions of life – that its many threads of action are increasingly fraying and wearing out.
Life is certainly complex and is obviously intended to be presented here in all its diversity, "unpredictable" just as the title already announces.
But unfortunately the novel seems more like
as if the author didn't quite trust her central idea herself and therefore had to present it with plenty of accessories and sensational effects in order not to risk boredom.
But the opposite effect occurs.
The local history digressions offer pages of Wikipedia prose that is tiring.
And the moments of shock and fright that accumulate become dull.
The original English title is "Wayward", which also means something like "stubborn", "unsteady", "stubborn" or "difficult to grasp and understand" and is closely related to the word "weird", which is most aptly " hexisch” (the witches in Shakespeare's “Macbeth” are considered “weird sisters”).
It is not only the publishing house, which one can only wish the best for, that shows remarkable courage to open with such a title.
Dana Spiotta, born in 1967, also dares to tackle a big, maybe even a bewitched topic with this novel.
His problem, however, is not so much the specific target group for readers in menopause as the indecisiveness with which she designs it.
Dana Spiotta: "Unpredictable". Novel.
Translated from American English by Andrea O'Brien.
Kjona, Munich 2023. 352 p., hardcover, €25.