Reviews and Comments

If you thought this was a book about romance scamming because it has been widely publicized that it was, you will probably be disappointed. At least there is no in-depth examination of this act of exploiting the trust and neediness of others. The main character actually writes with basically just one love scammer, which develops into a private chat between the two. The author uses this chat-like communication to address topics such as the responsibility of the Western world towards the Third World, but also as a narrative device to reveal certain thoughts and predicaments of her (autobiographical) main character Juno, namely depression, financial precarity etc. She usually uses chatting with strangers as a vehicle for her own fantasizing. But with this one scammer called Benu, she goes on a personal level and builds a relationship of mutual interest and humanity. At least to a certain extent. Because even though she is interested in the life of the Nigerian Benu, after a few chapters you can't help but get the impression that she uses chatting with him more as a way to pour out her musings and emotional worlds and to have a reason to write down her thoughts and worries. As a result, the chat logs with Benu gradually become quite a self-portrayal of Juno/Hefter, with ultimately very little interest in Benu's life. Although the main character sympathizes with Benu's life and often thinks about him, she hardly asks him any real questions. Perhaps this is precisely what Hefter wants to make the story about: the impossibility of overcoming this geographical and life-world distance. However, she doesn't address these issues enough and instead focuses on herself so much that it becomes obnoxious sometimes, which is mostly due to the fact though, that I find the character Juno not very likeable.

Juno is a woman in her mid-50s with a husband who suffers from multiple sclerosis, who is also a writer and who she has to look after and whose care consists of many microtasks that Juno has to take on every day. At the same time, she is a dance theater performer who bounces from funding program to funding program and is always short of money. I find Hefter's female speaker position actually quite exciting. Because even though I follow a lot of female authors, the reality of life for women in their mid-50s is very unfamiliar to me and, in a way, this cohort is also somewhat invisible in society. Hefter describes, for example, how it would feel for her to go to a club or what it was like for her to get a tattoo at her age, what it's like to get date requests on Instagram, etc. Even though Hefter often stays too much on the surface here, Juno offers a compelling glimpse into her own life and challenges that I would actually like to learn about.

However, the way in which Hefter draws this portrait of himself - conveyed by Juno - is not very convincing and, in my opinion, not successful from a literary point of view either. Almost all the characters in the book are named after Roman and Greek deities, which already comes off as a cheap trick often having been tried to give the characters more depth by adding the possibility of associating the characters with the attributes that come with these ancient gods - a depth and a dimension of personality that the characters in this book often don't have. It's only Juno who Hefter gives any literary substance to. All the other characters in the book remain very shadowy and the gods' names don't help her.

It's also all well and good to choose certain leitmotifs for a novel. However, this often makes the novel feel very redundant, for example when the author explains to us several times that the theater stage is the only real life for her, the place where she feels alive and can be everything she can't be in everyday life. In fact, this introspection is already hackneyed the first time and doesn't get any better with repetition. I also don't find it very appealed that Lars von Trier's ‘Melancholia’, of all films, has to be used again and again to illuminate the inner life of Juno. Of course, the idea of a comet hitting Earth and the end of the world exerts a tremendous fascination on us. But it is also a very unsubtle and soon hackneyed symbol for the kind of depression or melancholy that is attributed to Juno here - and the frequency with which the movie is mentioned in almost every chapter, as well as the fact that Juno also recommends Benu to definitely watch that movie, seems like a parody almost.

What other authors succeed in doing convincingly, namely, starting from the description of everyday episodes to work out general, sometimes universal human feelings, worries, views of the world and ways of living together, Hefter fails magnificently and has a tendency to artificially charge things with meaning and existential content. Sometimes Hefter succeeds in that, but too often she does not. Although Juno's multiple burdens (sick husband, little income, being a woman, etc.) are also a recurring topos in the book and these are also things worth writing a book about, Hefter's writing often remains in the realm of the trivial and we watch the main character preparing reports for a cultural promotion program ready for the post office and knocking over her coffee in the process, and the coffee stain on the documents is then supposed to be symbolic of the multiple stress factors Juno is facing.

For long stretches, the book feels as if you are watching Hefter as she discovers and tries out the possibility of charging things with meaning in a poetic way - which doesn't always have to fail: for example, when she describes her somnambulism at the beginning of the book and how being awake for a long time fills her with euphoria. Elsewhere, however, her flowery descriptions remain trivial and uninteresting. If it hasn't worked for me to build up a fascination for Hefter's autobiographical main character over two thirds of the book, then I'm no longer interested in the fact that she is now allowed to babysit a friend's dog and enjoys being a dog mom. Her experiences of resonance in everyday life - for example when, after visiting her sick husband in hospital, she finds herself in front of the Krakenhaus under a starry sky and in the wind of a rescue helicopter and somehow finds this moment beautiful. So perhaps this particular moment was very significant or symbolic or intense for Juno and with a bit of good will, I can try to put myself in the character's shoes and empathize with it. But rarely does Hefter make us an offer as a symbol of what these moments are actually supposed to stand for. Certainly, much can be related to the major themes of the book: Depression, multiple stresses and precarity, aging, etc., but Hefter's actual exploration of these themes remains fairly thin and it is largely up to the reader to take this reflective work further.

Furthermore, the literary trick of breaking out of the narrator's perspective in the middle of the book and pointing out to the reader that Juno is actually Hefter herself (which is actually pretty clear from the start and no surprise at all) and that she only uses the romance scammer Benu as a reason to write, i.e. to have a reason to write and at the same time an addressee for her writing. It all feels very writing workshop-like in the book and more like a writing exercise than writing a novel. Which is fine, but all in all it makes the book seem rather half-baked. Of course, a book doesn't always have to be perfectly formed and self-contained, but »Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es dir?« seems too erratic. The two scenic theater inserts in the book, which briefly break up the textual form of the book, come abruptly and seem more like stubborn impulses than enriching extensions of perspective to the rest of the text.

I am often unsure myself whether Hefter herself considers her descriptions important and what I should make of passages like these: »Der Komplex mit den Neubauten, die Karlbrücke über die Weiße Elster, hier konnte man die Sterne ganz gut sehen. Heute jedoch nicht, es war bedeckt. Ein Fuchs überquerte die Straße, dann zwei Waschbären, das war's.« I can appreciate the everydayness that Hefter writes about as well as the attempt to draw a picture of contemporary interpersonal communication, by including emojis and chat logs in her book. I can find some of the humorous parts in the book actually quite funny. I can find all this quite good so far. But in the end I find this whole story Hefter lays down here extremely simplified, somewhat shallow and largely uninteresting really.

As mentioned in the accolades on the back cover, Cusk is an author whose style is in the tradition of Virginia Woolf and who, in small gestures of everyday life, short banal slices of her characters' lives and introspections into their inner selves, manages to tackle questions of being-in-the-world and the intricacies of interpersonal relationships. For example when Cusk describes the fleeting encounters between a man and his wife and the lack of conversation between the two:

»He wants her to know that he is aware of his own limitations, of his failure to make anything of their conversations in the morning. Sometimes this failure appears to him as something intrinsic to time itself, as an inner force, like decay. They pass and are forgotten, these interludes in the kitchen. And yet they are always the same«.

Or when Cusk describes common situations such as preparing for a car vacation and what feelings these simple things invoke in the individual: »Sometimes it is more than a clearing of the air, this business of going away. It is a death and rebirth for them all. The problem is that the holiday, when it comes, sometimes feels like it is happening to someone else.«

In the book, Cusk illustrates short episodes from the lives of the Bradshaw family, with the couple Thomas and Claudia as the guiding star of the narrative. A middle-class couple from the academic milieu who, due to the promotion of Tonie within their institute, are now in the position of family breadwinner, previously held by Thomas, who is now in the role of househusband. Based on these two, the themes of the book are now developed. For example, the role of art in the lives of individuals. The question with which the book begins - and as hackneyed as the question may sound, it is interspersed throughout the novel to explore what drives the individual characters - is: What is art? Does it have something to do with creativity and timelessness? Or is it simply the possession of a skill, as Thomas asks himself during a visit to the circus and watching acrobats? Is it something that is always linked to melancholy or can creating art also be lightness and part of everyday life, as Claudia Bradshaw asks herself when she looks at the studio she only rarely or never visits:

»[Claudia] set eyes on the tumbledown place at the bottom of the garden and saw in it the reflection of a part of herself. It seemed to stand poised between existence and annihilation, just as she in that moment felt herself to hover, a dissolving image, at the very brink of identity. In its abandonment it had become theoretical, like the mysterious region of herself that life could seem to find no use for, the series of urges to which she gave the name of creativity.«

What all the female characters in the Bradshaw family have in common is that they struggle with questions of responsibility, their own independence and the realization that life always means restriction and confinement:

»Claudia remembers, when [her daughter] was born, the prospect of self-sacrifice coming into view like a landscape seen from an approaching train; she remembers the steady unfolding of it, a place she had never seen before in her life, and herself inescapably bound for it; and then after a while the realisation, pieced together from numerous clues, that this was where her mother had lived all along.«

This confinement is also repeatedly evident in Cusk's descriptions of how her characters move around in their (usually rather small) rooms, houses and households:

»What happened was that all those years ago, she fell in love with the house: she fell in love with it, and then as she came to know more and more about it the love was divided and subdivided until each piece of knowledge was larger than its allotted share of affection. This is the lesson, the sermon: that facts outlive emotions, and that knowledge is therefore more powerful than love. There are infinite things to know, but the capacity for love is just that, a capacity, a space that can hold so much and no more.«

What makes these descriptions so exciting and moving is not only Cusk's very precise way of describing and emphasizing things, but also the fact that her characters do not succumb to helplessness and defeatism in the face of their existence and their everyday lives, but instead always find new insights and new guiding ideas for their lives.

»The world always offers a small opportunity for difference, among a large majority of things that are all the same; and equally unfailingly Tonie takes it, only remembering afterwards that being different is not the same as being right.«

Equally appealing, however, is Cusk's ruthlessness when she emphasizes the determination of her characters and the strength of their feelings, which in turn make the characters somehow unwavering and make certain attitudes and positions immovable:

»[I]t seems to her now that this is the true accomplishment, this informed solitude, this independence. Is it not sad, then, to be alone? Is it, after all, truer, more honourable? She imagines herself and Thomas, old. She images their lives so entangled that they could never be extricated. It would be horrible to die tangled up with another person, not to know precisely what it was that was dying.«

At the same time, however, Cusk also shows that there are uncertainties, doubts and questions to which it will never be possible to find an answer or to which there will be no external, but only a purely self-referential approach and to which the individuals will only answer for themselves, eventually. About Tonie's sister-in-law Claudia we learn:

»The feeling of letting go, of surrender: it warms her veins like a tranquiliser, spreading its numb bliss. She has blunted the sharp end of life this way. She fades out, her doubt and pain and anxiety left hollow like a casing, like a shell on a beach. She is used to it, to leaving hollowed-out things behind her. They lie scattered in her past, questions to which the answers were never found. What is the right way to live? What is the value of success? And the most important, the most unanswerable: if love is selfish, can it still be considered to be love?«

And, likewise, do the other characters struggle with the fact that they can't tell anyone else what things feel like inside them and that their inner feelings can never be fully revealed:

»Thomas doesn’t know that there is anything in her plight he ought to be moved by. And she can never explain it to him, for as a story it revolves around the disclosure of a desire for something that has no name and is itself nameless, that she could arrive at only by a path of negatives that would somewhere along the line have to pass through Thomas himself.«

The kind of ordinariness and familiarity of the characters' feelings and thoughts in the book makes it easy to get very close to them, as the feelings of the individual people are also written down here, which you may often be ashamed of or which you only deal with yourself for other reasons.

»Der letzte Traum« enthält ein Dutzend, größtenteils eher flüchtige und kurzweilige Erzählungen von Pedro Almodóvar. Wie Almodóvar selbst im letzten Text des Buches – »Ein schlechter Roman« – schreibt, hält er sich selbst für keinen großartigen Schriftsteller und so lesen sich vor allem die fiktiven Texte in dem Buch, eher wie unausgearbeitete Ideen zu möglichen Drehbüchern oder Kurzfilmen, in welchen es Almodóvar selten schafft, seine Faszination für die Figuren, die er erschafft – flamboyante Persönlichkeiten mit sexuellem Grenzgängertum und borderline-mäßigen Charakterzügen – im Medium der Prosa-Erzählung zu vermitteln. Man kann sich oft genug vorstellen, wie die Szenen, die er zeichnet, in Form eines Almodóvar-Filmes funktionieren würden, der literarische Wert fehlt ihnen aber meistens.

Die Texte sind zeitlich ungeordnet und reichen von Texten aus Almodóvars Adoleszenz bis zu Aufzeichnungen aus dem Jahr 2022. Interessanterweise ist der früheste Text – »Leben und Tod von Miguel« – der literarisch interessanteste, wenngleich Almodóvar hier bloß unwissentlich die narrative Strategie von »The Curious Case of Benjamin Button« übernimmt: Er erzählt die Geschichte des Jungen Miguel, der im Zuge eines Eifersuchtsdramas erschossen wird, so, dass Miguels Ermordung eigentlich seine Geburt ist, mit der sein Leben in rückwärtigem Verlauf beginnt und etwa zwanzig Jahre endet als Miguel wieder zu einem Säugling geworden ist.

Mehr als einmal versucht sich Almodóvar auch am parabelhaften Schreiben: »Johnanna, das Wahnröschen« und »Die Spiegelzeremonie« versucht Almodóvar sich am Genre des Mittelaltermärchens bzw. der Vampirgeschichte, wobei letztere gleichzeitig eine parabolische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Katholizismus sein soll, die jedoch weniger überzeugend ausfällt als die Kurzgeschichte »Die Erlösung«, welche die Ankunft Gottes Sohnes auf die Erde erzählt und dessen Liaison mit dem räuberischen Gefängnisinsassen Barabbas oder »Der Besuch«, in welchem ein ehemaliger Schüler einer katholischen Schule auf seinen damaligen Pater trifft und mit dessen missbräuchlichen Handlugnen konfrontiert.

In »Zu viele Geschlechtsumwandlungen« beschreibt Almodóvar autofiktiv sein Verhältnis zu einem gewissen León – ein ungestümer, leidenschaftlicher Jugendfreund, mit der er seine ersten theaterstücke und Filme inszenierte. Hier verhandelt Almodóvar möglicherweise seine jungen Jahre als Regisseur in den 70ern und welche Art von Filmen und welche Regisseure (Elia Kazan, Jean Cocteau) einflussreich für ihn waren sowie seine latente Homosexualität bzw. seine Faszination für abweichende Sexualorientierungen. Wer der hier León genannte Freund und Kollaborateur Almodóvars ist und ob es nicht einfach nur eine fantasierte Vergangenheit ist, bleibt offen.

»Bekenntnisse eines Sex-Symbols« ist ein Monolog der großschnäuzigen Porno-Darstellerin Patty Diphusa, in der es unter anderem um ihre Begeisterung für Schmuck, Drogen und Geld geht und der so überzogen geschrieben ist, dass man den Text als Fingerübung Almodóvars im Pulp-Genre lesen muss. Dabei ist »Bekenntnisse eines Sex-Symbols« vermutlich der Text dieses Buches, den man sich am ehesten als Teil eines Drehbuchs von Almodóvar oder als Charakterstudie für einen seiner Filme vorstellen kann.

»Bittere Weihnachten« handelt von einer urbanen Irrfahrt einer Ehefrau, die um die Weihanchtstage schwere Kopfschmerzen und später eine Panikattacke bekommt und auf der Suche nach Xanax widerwillig zwei alte Freundinnen aufsucht. Der zweite Besuch gibt Almodóvar Anlass für eine kurze Abhandlung über die mexikanische Sängerin Chavela Vargas. Der darauffolgende Texte ist ein »Adieu, Vulkan« ist ein sehr persönlicher Nachruf Almodóvars auf Vargas, welche auch im Soundtrack zu dessen Filmen »Tacones lejanos« und »La flor de mi secreto« zu hören ist. Almodóvars florale Beschreibung der Musik Vargas' und ihres Charakters zeugt von einer tiefen Bewunderung und Almodóvar schafft es hier, wie sonst eher selten im Buch, seine Gefühlswelt sehr direkt nachvollziehbar zu machen.

So sind es in dem Buch also vor allem die biographischen und Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, die auch unabhängig von Almodóvars sonstigem Schaffen interessant sind, allen voran die titelgebende Geschichte »Der letzte Traum«, in dem Almodóvar über die letzten Lebenstage seiner Mutter schreibt. In »Erinnerung an einen leeren Tag«, einem seiner sehr seltenen und sporadischen Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, schreibt er über seine Faszination für Jean-Michel Basquiat, seinen Begegnungen mit Andy Warhol, kommt von dort zu kurzen Gedanken über die 80er-Jahre und der Rolle von AIDS in dder Kulturszene sowie seiner Begeisterung für das Vogueing, welches er bei einem New-York-Besuch zu dieser Zeit kennenlernt. Er erinenrt sich dann an einen Tattoo-Künstler, der jemandem Will Smiths Ohrfeige für Chris Rock gestochen hat und geht von da zu einem Metadiskurs über die Praxis des Schreibens über, in welchem er sich mit Leïla Slimani auseinandersetzt.

Wenn nun diese Erzählungssammlung literarisch nicht allzu hochwertig ist, schafft es der finale Text des Buches – »Ein schlechter Roman« – es noch einen mit dem schriftstellerischen Schaffen Almodóvars zu versöhnen, da er hier zugibt, dass das prosaische Schreiben nicht seine Stärke ist, er auch autofiktive Film-Romane kritisch sieht und die Unterschiede zwischen filmischem und literarischem Schreiben heraushebt. So relativiert der Text eigentlich die elf ihm vorangegangenen Texte und weist daraufhin, dass diese weniger als Literatur zu lesen sein sollen als vielmehr als eine kreative Form, die sich Almodóvar immer wieder aufdrängt und die er, auch wenn er seine eigenen Unzulänglichkeiten in Bezug auf das fiktive, prosaische Schreiben erkennt, sich ihm hin und wieder aufdrängt und nun eben in diesem gerade einmal 220-seitigem Buch gemündet ist.