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

[ book tip by Beat Mazenauer ] Tanja Maljartschuk’s prose texts are accounts of broken lives in the rural province – for instance, in the village of Samagurka or in the street in the Murawjow-Batterie. People are lonely, there’s no denying it. Their loneliness makes them slightly eccentric – they just don’t realize it. “Everyone believes he or she is normal and the others are the idiots.” In this state, Maljartschuk gives her narrators (both male and female) a voice with the effect of photos being taken when a camera shakes. Her characters speak about being alone and conceal this with clipped terseness or quips. The predominant feeling is resignation, but occasionally bizarre dreams surface such as in the wonderful opening story, “The Tail”:

“I’d like to have a tail. Not a tail like witches have, but a real one. A real bona fide tail. Like horses have.”

Such eccentricity may be unfulfilled, but the thought is uplifting. Miracles happen, albeit rarely and only once – whoever misses that moment will rarely get the opportunity again.
“Neunprozentiger Haushaltsessig” is a collection of three cycles of beautiful, eccentric, childish, quirky, evil, dreadful stories that occasionally reveal a clever and devious dialectic. “Das Muttermal” is a perfect example of this. In a monologue, a lover describes his undying love for his beloved, yet the longer he explains himself the more he reveals his incapability of giving love. The couple’s harmony together fades away as soon as she confesses to him that she has fallen in love with another. It’s fleeting – nothing more happens. The two remain together. But he never manages to win her back – the other man has found a way in like a phantom. “It’s not about him, but her. About the fact that she could fall in love with another” – he reassures himself, but in fact it’s all just about him. “People are great egoists and it is terrible to love a greater egoist than yourself.” That’s even truer when the greater egoist is a part of oneself.

[ Favourite quote ] Ich kenne Leute, die mögen nur drei Dinge. Sich selbst, essen und schlafen zum Beispiel. Oder sich selbst, reisen und sich selbst. Oder sich selbst, Friedhöfe und alte Kirchen. Also ich keinnen einen Typen, Damian, und der hat sogar zugegeben, dass er nichts mag außer Friedhöfen, Kirchen und sich selbst. Vielleicht ist das so eine Art Selbstbetrug, vielleicht stimmt es auch nicht. Aber ich mag auch nur drei Dinge.
Rauchen, Nägel kauen und ...
[...]
Sie denken, ich bin nicht normal, ja, wahrscheinlich, aber halt! Wer ist denn überhaupt normal?
(aus der Erzählung "Drei Dinge)

[ book info ] Maljartschuk, Tanja: Neunprozentiger Haushaltessig. (original language: Deutsch) Residenz Verlag, St. Pölten / Salzburg, 2009 (2007).
Translated from Ukrainisch by Claudia Dathe