[ book tip by Incentives ] Tales from an indecisive life
The title of poet Judith Nika Pfeifer’s first prose collection – zwischen (between) – is unpretentious, even restrained. It calls to mind an intermediate state perhaps, or a phase of ambiguity and indecisiveness. Indeed many of the twelve pieces seem to have one aspect in common. The people whose stories Pfeifer narrates (or, to be more specific, the people about whom she narrates) all inhabit various unresolved, perhaps unpromising spaces, yet have managed to settle in somehow: either with laconic acceptance, acquiescence, gallows humor, or a bit of hope. Yet not even death has the power to endow these individuals’ existence with shape and form.
For instance, at the very start of the collection in “Zwischenfall” (“Incident”), a tragic event involving a tightrope walker and his daughter is rewound from the cemetery to the fatal accident until nothing at all has happened and the nullified future dreams have been restored.
In “15 Minuten” (“15 Minutes”), we meet Herbert, who is taking a yoga class because he has fallen in love with the French instructor Véronique. Suddenly, during a breathing exercise, he believes he is dying, overtaken by a traumatic flashback to the car accident that claimed the lives of his parents and sister. Once his mortal fear has passed, he simply says “I am fine” to Véronique, who may or may not have noticed, then excuses himself and leaves.
Then there is the young woman in “Augenpaare” (“Pairs of Eyes”) who, wanting to lose her virginity after a concert, invites a married forester back to her room for a one-night stand. While having sex with him in the dark, she is seized by a nagging fear – at the same time tinged with a fervent desire – that her roommate asleep in the same room will hear them.
In “Owen und ich” (“Owen and I”), we meet a character who is actually called Owen but goes by the name of Ivan. Convinced that his scheme for achieving happiness and financial well-being is foolproof, he tries it out on the narrator, an aspiring writer making a living as a waitress.
The story of the deer that caused World War I is an exception, but Pfeifer recounts it with an equally masterful, light touch, in distilled and concise prose. Sentence by sentence, as the tension rises, it expands the void through which the stories often float, carried along by Pfeifer’s understated, witty humor. Perhaps this is the void of an insecure life that asks critical questions about love, death, and significance.

Abridged version of the review by Birgit Schwaner, 22 October 2010.
English translation by Jake Schneider.
Full German text: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=10482

[ book info ] Pfeifer, Judith Nika: zwischen. (original language: German) Czernin Verlag, Vienna, 2014 . ISBN: 978-3-7076-0487-0.