Michelle Steinbeck on the unfinished past and present
Published: Friday, Nov 8th 2024, 12:20
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In her second novel, "Favorita", Michelle Steinbeck does a great job: Over 450 pages with some rather shady characters, murder, kidnapping and a grand finale. A wonderfully atypical Swiss novel - and nominated for the Swiss Book Prize.
"Favorita" begins with the death of the eponymous character, who is also called Magdalena. Her doctor asks the narrator Fila to come to Naples: "Your mother has died, and they say it's because of the liver, but I can assure you it wasn't the liver. (...) I'm sorry, your mother was killed."
Fila barely knows her mother and embarks on a double search for clues. She follows in her mother's footsteps and quickly finds clues to solve her murder. Steinbeck turns what could have been a crime thriller into a wild trip to Italy. It is long in places until Fila comes across a memorial stone and a second femicide - that of the young farmer's wife Sisina in the 1940s.
Glorious arsenal of figures
"She was killed and then dragged through the mud for half a century," Fila notes at one point about Sisina. And that is precisely Steinbeck's point: with a glorious arsenal of characters ranging from old nobility to feminist resistance fighters, she shows who knows or thinks they know what exactly about one of the two murders and in what context. And, above all, how they tell, speculate or even dramatize with relish. And how little has changed since the 1940s.
In this respect, the novel "Favorita" is much more socio-critical than Steinbeck's debut "Mein Vater war ein Mann an Land und im Wasser ein Walfisch", which was longlisted for the German Book Prize and shortlisted for the Swiss Book Prize in 2016. Since then, the author has published a volume of poetry ("Eingesperrte Vögel singen mehr", 2018), written various plays, studied sociology and philosophy and founded the feminist collective RAUF with other female authors. All of these experiences can now be read.
A necromancy
Similar to her first novel, a fantastically surreal coming-of-age story in short, Steinbeck repeatedly blurs reality in "Favorita": "I couldn't tell what was reality, or delusion, fantasy, hallucination," summarizes Fila shortly before the grand finale. The murdered Sisina is also given a voice - as a ghost that Fila encounters in various forms.
These ghosts are a reminder of an unfinished past. "We have not prevented it. We accept it as if it were a law of nature that cannot be changed: men kill women." This applies not only to Italy in the 1940s, or to the contemporary, neo-fascist milieu that Steinbeck describes, but in general. In Switzerland, a woman is killed every two weeks by her husband, partner, ex-partner, brother or son. Every week, a woman survives an attempted femicide. The number of unreported cases remains unknown, as there is no official body that records femicides.
In her fiction, Steinbeck - whose grandmother is actually Italian - manages to put an end to this "law of nature" in a grand finale*.
*This text by Philine Erni, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
©Keystone/SDA
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