glory! The name of a mortgage; a burden for man, woman, which is often hard to bear. On her 70th birthday, Monika receives a letter from her school friend Gloria, written by her niece. She, Gloria, wanted to see “Moni” again before she died. Moni goes to Bregenz, to the now dilapidated villa with which so many memories are connected.
The meeting of the two women becomes a double conference centered on a deep but difficult friendship. And then Gloria says: “Write about me, Moni, because when I die, something of me will still be there.”
After her highly successful and exceptionally literary family trilogy “Die Bagage”, “Vati” and “Löwenherz”, the Vorarlberg writer Monika Helfer has once again extracted a character from her biography. But with her it’s never clumsy autofiction, it’s always pieces of life that are transformed into literature; refined, clarified, often alienated and thus going beyond the personal, the individual.
Helper writes coolly, but never coldly. She doesn’t get tangled up in garlands of words, she condenses; her descriptions of people are intimate but never exploitative. “The Virgin”, the title of the new novel, refers to the secret that Gloria reveals to her friend at this meeting: “I’ve never slept with a man.”
Two unequal lives
She, the heartthrob, the daughter from a rich family, grew up with her eccentric mother, she’s been looking for her absent father all her life. You, the adventurous, the bold, who nevertheless remained a stranger in this world. Untouched, not only by the men. It’s about two unequal lives with great attraction, but also stark opposites. Moni comes from a poor family and slips into a violent first marriage.
The lives of the two women cross again and again, then diverge again. Gloria lives between glamour, lies, fantasy and self-deception; Monika has four children, marries a second time and becomes a writer.
Much remains in the balance, much unspoken. This is also one of Monika Helfer’s strengths. She refuses to be unambiguous and leaves room for the mysterious. What is fact, what is fiction, what is truth? Free! Literature is responsible for truthfulness. Monica Hilfer knows that.
Book tip: Monica helper. The Virgin. Hanser,
150 pages, 22.70 euros.
2023-08-26 14:11:50
#Monika #Helfer #sad #shine #Gloria
