Annette Pehnt’s minimal tales | FAZ | EUROtoday

Climbing a volcano: how do you begin? You can already know this earlier than studying the story in the course of the amount of quick tales by Annette Pehnt, who gave it the title: with small steps. Regardless of whether or not you’re a vacationer or a researcher, whether or not you may have an aesthetic curiosity and wish to benefit from the eerily stunning spectacle of the frozen drive of nature or whether or not you wish to know whether or not there may be nonetheless an explosion hazard lurking beneath the crust – in any case you’ll fastidiously and attentively put one foot in entrance of the opposite and take a tiny break after every contact with the bottom. Said with a graphic picture: make a degree.

When you open Annette Pehnt’s ebook, what catches your eye is the printed picture. Each sentence types its personal paragraph. The sentences are quick. Many solely want one line. The first-person narrator characters within the quantity communicate in protocol sentences. They preserve information. Your world is all that’s the case. Although in addition they report on their needs and fantasies, in addition they deal with these fragments of unreality as information of life. Sometimes a easy message is split once more in order that it gives materials for 2 sentences.

Pehnt makes use of this analytical system twice originally of the story of the mom, who now lives alone within the condominium from which her youngsters have moved out. “There are posters on the walls. And old tape. They took everything else with them. To their new rooms.” Why two sentences concerning the wall decorations? The mom walks via the youngsters’s rooms, her eyes wander over the posters. Then she comes up and sees the tape. The element indifferent from the poster acquires a succinctness like in a photorealist portray, besides that the creativeness of Pehnt’s readers nonetheless has one thing to do. You can think about the previous adhesive movie brittle and darkened and keep in mind that as a baby you had been required to connect the posters of your supposedly shortly altering favourite singers with tape and never with thumbtacks so as to shield the wallpaper. The momentary state of affairs has turn into everlasting; the singers – or regardless of the objects of the posters could also be – have belatedly misplaced their favourite standing.

The mom can’t take a look at the proof of transience with emotion. Their world is ruled by the legislation of sentencing, with which Funny van Dannen refutes the comfort concerning the therapeutic energy of time: Time can solely go. It could be pointless to tear down the posters, and it’s equally pointless to go away them up. The youngsters (who stay anonymous within the story) not stay right here.

And why do the brand new rooms get their very own set? Logically talking, the second sentence is simply an implication of the primary. It is evident that the youngsters have taken their belongings with them to their new rooms. They are regular, blissful youngsters – they do not stay on the streets. But for the mom, there are two sides to the method. The youngsters have left their mother and father’ dwelling and moved into a brand new world. This is a double insult, though it was a single act (per baby). Recapitulating the loss hurts a second time. The sample of repetition that provides a steady rhythm to the mom’s go to to her museum of life doesn’t kill or anesthetize the ache, however reasonably manages it. Through Pehnt’s narrative fashion, our on a regular basis life is portrayed as a land of volcanoes, during which we are able to anticipate at any time {that a} barely perceptible earthquake will trigger the bottom to burst open. But the residents have settled into the floor within the sense that there are basically no disagreeable surprises for them.

This even applies to the youngsters who flee into the forest to flee the misfortune of their mother and father’ marriage. They do not know the time period consuming dysfunction, however they know what is going on on. “Mom always has to puke. She slams the door and locks herself in the bathroom. For hours. We have to use the guest bathroom.” In the forest the 2 sisters play that they’re deer. Part of the seriousness of function play is the pauses during which you step out of character. “We run in zigzags until we get to the top. At the top we eat chewing gum. We’re not deer until we get to the top.” The ladies spend the night time within the forest and defend themselves from the grownup world by setting their very own guidelines. “We collected stones, black and white. With them we made a circle. Around our shelter. No one is allowed to cross it. Except us.”

The creator additionally proceeded in the identical means, solely with out reserving the precise to transgress. The subtitle identifies the items within the quantity as “minimal stories”. Annette Pehnt has subjected herself to a restriction that’s as arbitrary as it’s clearly outlined in her selection of phrases and sentence construction. The circle she has drawn, as she notes within the afterword, is the foundations of plain language. Your firm follows the custom of avant-garde experiments, comparable to these carried out by the French faculty of poets Oulipo. Of course, there isn’t a hint right here of artificiality, which is related to the voluntary and constant renunciation of sure linguistic prospects. The easy means promote an infinite density, depth and richness of the messages.

The lengthy sentence of German narrative prose of classical-realistic provenance depicts the event of the plot in its intertwining method, but additionally relieves the reader of getting to comply with the event step-by-step. However, nothing stays hidden from the reader of “Climbing a Volcano”. You really feel such as you’re sitting within the Elbphilharmonie and a single flute is taking part in on the rostrum.

The brevity and unity of the phrases set the laconic total temper of an everlasting current tense. The impression of the announcement of a change in tempo is all of the extra highly effective. The first story, “Choosing Someone,” speaks of a girl who, with a good friend, secretly takes the place of the sister she by no means had in her life. You suspect from the beginning that issues cannot finish nicely, though fortunately it would not finish badly both. The promise and the specter of this implausible recreation based mostly on self-made guidelines are expressed in a single sentence, which the narrator follows the knowledge that she would have preferred to chop off her now sister’s hair prior to now: “But that’s changing now.”

When you see the traces in “Climbing a Volcano,” you would possibly at first assume you may have a ebook of poetry in your hand. In reality, Annette Pehnt’s minimalism signifies that her tales are like poems: each phrase sits right here.

Annette Pehnt: “Climbing a volcano”. Minimal tales. Piper Verlag, Munich 2025. 288 pages, hardcover, €24.