All guests of the European Literature Days from 2009 to 2014.

[ book tip by Ulrike Matzer ] ‘Before all the light fades away/before the light goes out with the clouds, linden trees, the setting sun; before everything scatters: I’ll go myself. Take a running start and fly off somewhere.’ Such a freely inserted double punctus or colon allows you to pause, draw breath, get ready for the sentence, and opens up space – starting something. ‘There is no element in which language resembles music more than in punctuation marks,’ says Adorno in his Notes to Literature: ‘each mark has its own physiognomic value, its own expression, which cannot be separated from its syntactic function, but is not exhausted by it either’; marks whose ‘bodiless presence nourishes the body of language’. [1] In Reitzer’s prose texts, this body is dissociated, fragmented into individual images and sequences so that every few pages, as expressed laconically by Uwe Johnson, it can ‘begin simply and sternly so:’[2] descriptions of situations, beginning in lowercase with two words in bold lettering. Images seemingly photographic, and sequences like those in an episodic film: Angelika Reitzer’s gaze is photo- and cinematographic; it strives respectively to capture and pursue something. Her narrative deploys optical metaphors that, like lenses, are brought sharply into focus or blurred. At times things are abruptly illuminated: glistening luminescence is followed by dimness, in between a few things swim in diffuseness: here, the bright vastness of a new world (Berlin) into which a young woman, Maria, breaks away and sets out; there, provincial stuffiness and the constraints of the ‘family unit’ that she flees. Though what happens next, who is where and how, is rarely immediately clear: each image develops only slowly, contours growing gradually sharper, connections becoming evident. In flashes forward, back, and in between, the factual blends with the vaguely remembered, with daydreams and hints of trauma, leaving the protagonist beside herself or disconcertingly down: ‘Wings flap while you lie there with a broken neck.’ Using questions that are not questions, and narrative perspectives that jump between the external and internal, the author starkly yet sensitively depicts how someone spreads her wings and becomes a fledgling, perhaps somewhat prematurely; an awakening and a coming of age, pictured through the experiences of being a child; Maria ‘bolts from the fusty realm’ of the family, moves from her position offside, back into life and love, and this means quite carefree love affairs: a bit naive, coy and daring, often sloshed or stoned, she lays herself open to the world: over-exposed. Reitzer’s poetic way of thinking and formulating literature is shown by more than her punctuation. Sparing, precise, prudent, her language differs pleasantly from the rough and ready scribbling popular in the milieu of Berlin’s creative precarity portrayed in her work. In the fragmentary, in what has an excerpt-like quality, sensuous details are set with enormous density: a quiet intensity. Of course: searching for your identity and the adventure of adolescence are well-known themes; and to consciously draw on ‘or out of them’, as the author words it, is evidently a challenge for Reitzer. A material is as elastic as you weave it: in a perception stretched to the nunc stans, accelerated feeling proliferates unexpectedly: ‘It’s a new pace or the opposite/anti-speed’, the book states, and in Reitzer’s blog, ‘angelika express’, we read: ‘Of course, from the self-confident female perspective every topic can be illuminated, no matter how big or small it may allegedly be.’[3] Well now, these reflections are very light, lucid, luminous. [1] Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Satzzeichen’. In: Noten zur Literatur, Frankfurt/Main 1981, p. 106. English translation adapted from: ‘Punctuation Marks’. In: Notes to Literature, Columbia UP, 1991.
[2] Uwe Johnson, Das dritte Buch über Achim. Frankfurt/Main 1961, p. 7
[3] agnesz, Dürfen die das?! Ein paar Gedanken zur Diskussion ‘Autorinnen und große Themen’, http://angelikaexpress.twoday.net (19 September 2005). This is an abridged version of a more extensive review by Ulrike Matzer, first published in: Literatur und Kritik N° 417/418, Salzburg: September 2007; here quoted from: www.literaturhaus.at (April 2008)

[ book info ] Reitzer, Angelika: Taghelle Gegend. (original language: Deutsch) Haymon, Innsbruck – Wien, 2006 . ISBN: 9783852185231.