[ book tip by Incentives ] “Writing holds my hand”

How does the past smell? Like the green moss of the titular “childhood forest”? Or the gray dust of the childhood home, casting inward shadows? The important thing is to avoid casting any shadows at all. To escape upstairs from the drunk father, the weeping mother. Decades later, dirty child-sized handprints are still discernible on the walls of the stairwell. Upstairs there are sightless windows and the cabinet with the Mary Mother of God figurine, which no one wants, not if she’s touched it.

The village - they are the others. They are waited on by her single mother, who has taken over her runaway father’s debt-ridden store. “Die already,” is the grown daughter’s belated response to her father’s falling ill with terminal cancer. As a child, her sense of guilt keeps her silent. Guilt that is rightfully his.

And time heals no wounds. Quite the contrary: “Everything is always today.” And today is everywhere. Even, and especially, when it comes to language, since language is the dictatorship of others: “You all placed your words in my mouth, stuffed my mouth full of them, locking them away from my own use.” Despite that, it is language that becomes the narrator’s personal tool for liberation, even if stories offer no solace and words always remain the same. She is grounded by the pure sensory experience of writing and the body of words she can sketch with her pen. “Writing holds my hand, my handwriting ... forms an outline around me, and I do not collapse.”

Elke Lasznia's novel “Kindheitswald” is formed precisely by this ambivalence. For although language is a melting pot of a lifetime of wounds, words are the only remedy to give these injuries expression. Thus above all, the hard work of healing comes through language. Every word reads as if chiseled from a spiritual quarry. Clauses fall like boulders right into the text. They pile up onto, over and beneath one another and break into miniscule fragments or crumble before the narrator into dust. Dust like the handful that her sons collect in a jar rescued from the ruins of the house, to save for her as a memento and hide under a car seat. With her first novel, Elke Laznia achieves the same kind of preservation through her profound literary soul-searching and poetic engagement with language. Laznia’s “Kindheitswald” is an emotional debut, rife with moving language.

Abridged version of the review by Michaela Schmitz, February 2014. English translation by Jake Schneider
Full German text: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=10280

[ book info ] Laznia, Elke: Kindheitswald. (original language: German) Müry Salzmann Verlag, Salzburg, 2014 . ISBN: 978-3-99014-093-2.