No impulse suicide
Michael Kumpfmüller, who is in his late 50s and as old as Virginia Woolf at the end of his life, is able to “walk in her soul”, as the narrator says. He repeatedly weaves phrases from Woolf’s works into his novel – often even subconsciously. First he read everything about Virginia Woolf from morning to evening for months, he says: “I already knew some of it, that is, the novels, but not the diaries and letters. I read that and took notes. You kind of record it , partly as music, partly as fragments of thoughts, and what then comes back in writing this text is completely out of control. ”
In “Oh, Virginia” Kumpfmüller succeeds in the empathetic portrait of a woman who can no longer get out of her “grief cave”, from her depressed “prison life”, therefore chooses suicide and goes into the water: “The fact is that there is no impulse -Suicide is or is even in complete delirium, but it is the result of a work, a balance sheet work.You don’t like it anymore, it is also called at the very beginning.That is important to me because – the narrator also says it on one – You could come to a different conclusion than she drew it. That has to be left open for me because otherwise I would be an apologist for suicide and I am not. I can respect that but I have the feeling that she acted very unfairly towards life. She actually had everything and is still so dissatisfied. Somehow that also outrages me. “
A fine-nerved artist’s novel
Leonard Woolf could also have sighed in the title of this sensitive and readable novel: “Oh Virginia”. But he didn’t. Instead, he stuck to his wife, and he endured her in all her caprices – even if it was often difficult for him: “He was concerned with his personal well-being, for example, during Virginia’s affair with Vita Sackville-West, which was very stressful for him, as far as one can reconstruct it, not so important. I think he believed so much in her as a writer that he subordinated his own needs to it. Nowadays, in our very self-controlled society, it seems almost crazy . “
At one point in this novel it says: “After her death she does not want to be disassembled in books.” Michael Kumpfmüller did not dismantle Virginia Woolf. Rather, he brings them closer to us in all their tragic hopelessness.
“Oh, Virginia” by Michael Kumpfmüller has been published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch.
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