Caroline Peters explores her own path in her debut novel
Published: Tuesday, Oct 15th 2024, 09:40
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Family idyll my ass: in her debut novel "Another Life", German actress Caroline Peters tells the touching story of a patchwork family that is abandoned by its central figure, the mother. There are reasons for this.
The two older sisters, who only relax when the youngest sister gets angry. The mother, who marries her three childhood friends one after the other and has a daughter with each of them, but at the same time lives above all for poetry and Russian literature and feels crushed by her family's expectations. Memories that become a delicate matter because everyone remembers them differently. And the father's funeral, which causes the youngest daughter to look back on her mother's life and her own childhood. It is not a family idyll that is created here.
Debut novel by an actress
"Ein anderes Leben" is the first novel by actress Caroline Peters, who previously became known to a wider audience with television productions such as the crime series "Mord mit Aussicht". She has just been a guest at the 20th Zurich Film Festival, where she presented the film "Der Spitzname", the third after "Der Vorname" and "Der Nachname" by Sönke Wortmann. This year, she also rejoined the ensemble of the Burgtheater in Vienna.
Her novel is about finding your own way, but also about asserting yourself against the one oversized figure in your life - in this case your long-dead mother. Her mother, whose name is Hanna, meanders between bourgeoisie and bohemia with great energy and dedication, but also increasingly lost.
For example: she spends Sunday mornings in bed with her youngest, reading Pushkin's works and drinking champagne from a wafer-thin porcelain cup. But when she finds a word that may not have been translated well, she forgets the togetherness, surrounds herself with dictionaries and notes and searches for a solution. Rarely has it been shown so memorably how lost a child, in this case a teenager, can feel.
Mother at the center
Hanna turns afternoons at confirmation classes into a show and makes a grand entrance, taking center stage as she so often does - to the horror of her youngest daughter, who is furious. And in the university library where she works, she flirts with students - in full view of her daughter.
At the same time, however, Hanna and her third husband Bow, the father of their youngest daughter, not only want to belong in the neighborhood, they also want to shine: so she dresses in cream like all the neighbors, hands out cakes and salmon canapes and tries to impress visitors. The result of this pretense: depression. Eventually she leaves the family.
The author knows what she is doing. In the middle of the novel, there is a sentence that describes her first work quite precisely: "It is difficult to keep the memories in chronological order." This is a thought of the youngest daughter, the narrator, who slowly realizes how her whole world, including her three fathers, her sisters and herself, revolve like planets in orbits around the fixed star - her mother Hanna. The result is a web of memories from very different times, which, like sprinkles, repeatedly interrupt the present with the father's funeral and the time shortly afterwards, stopping it in its tracks and brushing it against the grain.
Caroline Peters skillfully juggles these different time levels in her debut novel. She sensitively and lovingly describes the idiosyncrasies of a mother who repeatedly falls out of the expected role and who actually sees her own path elsewhere, not with her family. Humor shines through, even at the dramatic and melancholy climax. There's no need to worry about the motto: now she's writing too.
Unreliable memories
The author is also not afraid to leave things unclear: Why does Hanna separate from her husband and family? Does she do it at all? It becomes clear how difficult it is to rely on memories - especially when other people remember the same event very differently. The two older sisters believe that their mother did not leave of her own free will, but was "kicked out", so to speak, by Bow and the youngest daughter.
But the narrator, always referred to as "the little one", finally understands why her mother leaves her husband and family, breaks away and moves to another apartment: "Her thoughts and feelings had finally reached the point that Hanna had been striving for: a home of her own. Not her husband's home, not her mother's home, not even a home that she could offer her children. A home that she owed to her racing thoughts, the many words in her head and her soul." To finally go her own way.
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