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Kathrin Schmidt’s novel, which won the 2009 German Book Prize, tells the story of the loss and discovery of self, the reclaiming of life in the shadow of sickness and death. Helene Wesendahl, a 44-year-old writer, suffers a cerebral hemorrhage and wakes up in a hospital bed, unable to move or speak, with no idea what has happened to her or who she is: “So now she thinks about how she looks. How does she look? She no longer knows, she has no image of herself.”
Unable to communicate, unable to ask questions, she pieces together the mosaic of her life and self from the fragments of memory in an attempt to regain solid ground. But what was once terra firma has become steep terrain on which she only gradually finds her footing. Her journey into her own past brings perplexing and disturbing discoveries: she meant to abandon the father of her children, leave their shared home and start a new relationship with Viola, a woman, formerly a man, to whom she felt an increasingly powerful and exclusive attraction.
The hemorrhage has brought about the desired separation in a completely different way, uprooting her from her old life, but only increasing her earlier dependency: her partner, Matthes, visits her on a daily basis in the hospital and in rehab, resuming his former role and trying to draw her back into the bosom of the family. Helene realizes that it is not enough to recall her former resolutions and decisions. Ultimately, the sickness has taken her back to the moment of decision which she must now repeat anew. If she wants to put her world back together, she cannot rely on her previous life plan; she must invent a new one.
In this process her body is always a step ahead of her consciousness, reacting more quickly and decisively. When Matthes tells her of Viola’s sudden death (the doctor and relatives “agreed on heart failure”), it precipitates an epileptic seizure that makes the gradually emerging order collapse once again. It was Viola, uncategorizable, anarchic, shifting between male and female, who had sparked her desire for escape and autonomy; now isolated objects and mementoes – a barrette, a computer disc – assume the character of fetishes. Helene seeks and grasps at these things as if to take hold of her previous life.
But You are not going to die is not only about the palpable affirmation of one’s own existence, the contemplative exploration of one’s earlier life. The novel is also a book about language, about learning to speak, the ability to speak. For the protagonist, the attempt to affirm her identity or to create a new one is primarily a problem of language. Following the experience of aphasia, she is subjected each day to the effort of finding words, an effort that is almost more grueling than learning movements, gestures, steps.
In the attempt to make contact with her surroundings and formulate simple sentences, syllables or entire words keep disappearing, in a sense reversing Kleist’s “gradual formulation of thoughts while speaking”. Language becomes a “sleeping animal” that must first be tracked down and woken up: “She must seek out each word and pronounce it silently before saying it aloud. [...] Interior speech works better somehow. It seems as though, even before the translation into the spoken word, the construction plan of speech collapses, making it impossible. So that she no longer has any plan of what the speech should have been about. As soon as even a little excitement intrudes, the verbal house of cards collapses.”
This state is all the more catastrophic for the protagonist since she herself is an author who lives from writing and for writing. She had completed her book on the very day when the cerebral hemorrhage suddenly switched off her thought and speech center. Or was it the other way around? Did her body wait until she was finished with her work, her novel? Now it seems completely unreal to her that at one time she had no need to search for words, was even able to play with them: “Poems? How does that work? She just can’t picture it.”
She must find her way into her own writing as if it were a stranger’s, groping for the emotion that reading poetry once inspired in her. The novel beautifully illustrates this process of recapture using the example of a poem by Seamus Heaney; Helene retells its content line by line in an attempt to grasp some of poetry’s magic once again.
For the book’s author Kathrin Schmidt this tale of suffering is no arbitrary literary subject – it is her own experience. And the biographical parallels between her and her main character are drawn with correspondingly vividness. Born in 1958 in the East German city of Gotha, she has published a number of novels and poetry collections and won various prizes; like Helene Wesendahl, she lives in a house in Berlin with her husband and five children. She shares with her heroine the experience of German reunification, a life in two different political systems. In 2002 she also suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, went into a coma, was paralyzed on one side and was long unable to speak. She was left with slight disabilities, now able to write only with her left hand.
She was forced to find her way back into life, learn to organize her speech and coordinate her movements. This book is a testimony to her success. In this regard You are not going to die is both: a novel about an existential issue and a literary affirmation of regained language, of life.
Matthias Weichelt
August 2010
[Translated by Isabel Cole]
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