Eva Schörkhuber: Die Gerissene.

Fashionista. Novel.
Vienna: Edition Atelier, 2021.
327 pages, Hardcover, EUR 22,00.
ISBN: 978-3-99065-047-9.

Eva Schörkhuber

Review

Excerpt:

I hesitated, and then tried to explain to her that I had been irritating since before I was born, that I had always been blasted out of stable structures. I actually said "displaced," and Sara gave me a long look with an inflection that was not mocking, like the looks I was given back when I made my first giddy explorations of Marseille’s maze of narrow streets, no, the inflection of her gaze was blue and crisp like a spring sky with puffy clouds racing across it. I felt like a laundry line in Sara’s eyes, pulled taut under the sun, whose rays swept along my back. My stories hung on me like scraps of cloth in the wind, and depending on how hard the wind was blowing, depending on which direction it came from, they puffed up, fluttered, flew up. After all the long years of travel, I understood that mostly, I’d been circling myself. I’d wanted to gain a foothold on the kaleidoscopic paths full of promise, like the ones clad in blue, the more unfathomable paths. The fabric out of which I’ve woven my life is multihued and drab, brittle and hard, I did things with it, I played with chance. The great goddesses, they rolled the dice and I, I sat down at their table, I got in on the act, and tried my luck.
These thoughts raced through my mind like spring clouds performing their first maneuvers. Sara didn’t let me out of her sight the whole time, not even when the sky grew darker, when the blue crisp inflection with its airy white sprinkles of cloud gave way to sulphur yellow. Like enormous hailstones, thoughts of people who had been persecuted, displaced, and taken hostage pelted down upon me.

(p. 166 – 167)

Epilogue

No matter how many turns my life has taken, how many ends it may have knotted together, I’ve never been able to lose sight of the fact that most of our universe is made of invisible dark material. We have it to thank that the stars unite to move together across the sky. Where there is much light, there is even deeper shadow; a compact, impenetrable obscurity that remains unmoved by illusionless clarity. The universe is a giant string that vibrates in and out of our existence, expanding and creating sounds that are sometimes amazingly harmonic, and sometimes decidedly disharmonic. In truth, it is a wild and elementary sound, an interplay of vibrations that has never known a conductor – just as little as life, as my life, which, like the universe as a whole, is explained by the fact that consonance cannot be created just like that. Excluded from the great orchestrations of ambitious musical directors, they have set out on their own, searching for sound chambers in which they can be heard: apocryphal harmonies, free dissonances, individuals expelled from their social orbits, I can call them however I like. In every era, in every place, overtones of this kind, some people would most definitely call them infirmities, have come together to change the usual course of events.

(p. 226)

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