Status: 05/28/2021 8:09 a.m.
“Echos Kammern” by Iris Hanika is a travel and romance novel. This is where modern city life and myth interweave. He is nominated for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair 2021.
For the writer Hanika, language is the best means of enduring the present. She said that a few years ago in an NDR interview. In her books, for which she was awarded the European Union Literature Prize and the LiteraTour Nord Prize, among other things, language and grammar always play an important role – as does an ironic, culturally pessimistic view of the present. Her new novel has now been published by Droschl-Verlag: It is called “Echos Kammern”. Jan Ehlert introduces him.
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The story of Narcissus and Echo is one of the most tragic tales in Greek mythology. Both have been cursed by the gods. Narcissus, the beautiful youth, fell in love with his own reflection. Echo, the talkative nymph, madly in love with Narcissus, was deprived of the ability to express his own thoughts.
It says nothing new, never anything new, nothing and nothing new, it always and exclusively says the same thing as what has just been heard, as what has already been said. It seems she doesn’t have an opinion of her own. But that is not true. She just can’t share them, because that’s not what the gods made her for. And over time she gets used to it and forgets what she is thinking.
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Sophonisbes new language world
The so-called “echo chambers” in the social networks send their regards. But how do you say something new, something that has never been seen before? Sophonisbe, middle-aged and moderately successful new poet of the echo myth, namely from a feminist point of view, and also the bearer of a name that seems to exclaim: I am something special, so Sophonisbe tries the radical way: She invents a new language.
She was totally proud of that because she thought that a poet couldn’t do more than develop his own language, not just his own style, which is completely normal, everyone does that, but his own language! The hammer! Stefan George may have developed his own font, but what is that against a language of its own!
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Iris Hanika lets her readers immerse themselves page by page in Sophonisbe’s linguistic world, which sounds a bit like an American who knows vocabulary but likes to ignore grammar.
At night I drove over the Manhattan Bridge subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and I remembered Paris, where the metro goes over the Seine, because I saw the city lights on the other side of the river.
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In New York, Echo-Sophonisbe meets her Narcissus: Josh, young, beautiful, whose seductive reflection appears to be his smartphone.
When he saw that he was being looked at, he looked up, and when he saw that it was she who was looking at him, his face was transformed into the Olympic glow that had so disturbed her. She remembered that now and wondered why she was upset about it. He couldn’t help how he looked! “Hi, Sophi. How are you?” But he could do something for the fact that he knew what he looked like and had sat down so picturesquely that he could look up like in a movie.
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At a party at Beyoncé’s
There are strong, illuminating images with which Iris Hanika brings the old myth into the new era. And yet it is only one detail in a larger narrative in which the plot can be driven in a completely new direction at any time by a Dea Ex Machina suddenly appearing – including a wonderfully evil, independent interlude about the Berlin party scene. The pop singer Beyoncé finds her echo here as well as poems by Uljana Wolf or Cole Porter songs.
Again and again Hanika pushes the boundaries of its own echo chambers, creates moments of recognition and yet lets every expectation run into the void. Her goal is to write something completely pointless, says Hanika. It’s irritating, provocative – but above all, incredibly entertaining. And indeed a book that has never been read before.
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