One of the remarkable stories about Jane Campbells, who appeared in a German translation two years ago, is a great “hunger for the skin that we all feel.” The Norwegian author Wenk Mulisen, who was born in 1953, calls the need for physical touch very similar to the “gnawing hunger of the skin”, which, as her first -person storyteller feels in his first novel “Everything I am afraid, has already happened.”
Together with female figures, their age is their age, at the age of 69, the storyteller Mulizen is only a little younger than Campbell. However, while the latter can return to clashes with the so -called science fiction – sensually experienced, computer human imitation – encountering the real possibilities of physical meetings after the end of a long marriage.
At first there is a sense of betrayal by her husband, the depression that lasts. “I do not want to be such a person,” she says. “But now I am feeding on a painful placenta of refusal.” Now she must learn to live alone.
Rare samples in the heteroma market
However, in addition to grief, she soon experiences the desire for a new proximity, for a physical touch, even after sex, because she did not leave her thirst. The fear of “the future as a lonely elderly woman who is trembling from unsightly longing, erotic desire, Marty memorials (…),” great. Analysis of her chances to get acquainted with one single, your handsome person is sobering up: “Competition for these rare samples in the heteroma market is merciless.”
The author easily connects the personal, intimate perception of his storyteller from the first person with her thoughts on social relations. An objective look at older women is more predatory than elderly men, which is described by Mulisen in other words in the novel. And she talked about this in a literary podcast Phase, Where she also said that she registered in three dating portals for research.
Because her storyteller will finally go along this path as much as she also despises the “industry of late capitalist intimacy.” The fact that Mulizen describes in a conversation as a “mixture of humiliation and possibilities”, it allows its figure intensively after she registered in Tinder.
Tense in a voice on the phone after a promising chat, infant hope at (next) meeting, abuse of disappointment in the meeting; learn to reject and be rejected; Feel like an undesirable product – age seems to exacerbate these sensations that many experience through online knowledge. Mulisen talks about this in a clear, living language, sensitive, but the sound can also be an independent joke.
It doesn’t end well
The absurdity, for example, makes the scene while traveling to Berlin, in the bar the storyteller is amazing the slightly younger, allegedly attractive Alan in all respects: “Adrenaline hormone of the disaster flows through wisdom. (…) I clap my hands in my heart and order Gene -Tonik. My neck is hard. What begins does not end well.
Again and again, the narrator looks into the past, feels that he combines the current loss with previously lost losses. She looks at her childhood, some of the cruel family conditions. He remembers the sexual experience that forms them. The question of your behavior in recent years of marriage.
The narrator of Mulizen passes through the existential crisis. Longing for a physical meeting takes up a lot of space. Shame does not feel in view of its sensual, also clearly sexual desires, but in relation to your own body, which is so changed in old age. On the one hand, this burning end, this shame on the other. As well as your own requirements for a male colleague.
Straight
Mulisen gives his storyteller a greater openness, a direct tongue, when it comes to her lust, as well as about overcoming her body, “to show a breakdown, which is not relieved by intimacy, as it can be in long -term relationships.”
In her stories, mentioned at the beginning, Jane Campbell created a literary area for completely different, unique old and old female figures, and also clearly took the topic of desire and desire for physical touch. Wencke Mühleisen relies on the prospect for expanding this space: it becomes a little more thanks to the life, experienced, multifaceted storyteller, who ends the balance between painful depth and an inclined look and gives readers almost all kinds of shock, beautiful sets. However, there are no simple answers.
