Debut novel from Austria with a Swiss connection
Published: Monday, Jan 29th 2024, 11:10
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"Wir sitzen im Dickicht und weinen" is the title of Viennese author Felicitas Prokopetz's debut novel. The image that gives the novel its title can be found after just a few pages: The mother has been diagnosed with cancer, the adult daughter Valerie rushes to hospital - and yet is only confronted with accusations again.
Self-pity makes tears flow. "I like living so much," says the mother. I would love to be somewhere else right now, thinks the daughter. There is a lot of crying, but also a lot of screaming in Joesi Prokopetz's book. It deals with conflicts between children and parents across the generations, with mother-daughter relationships taking center stage.
The author Prokopetz studied philosophy at the University of Vienna, language arts at the University of Applied Arts and literary writing at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. She works as an advertising copywriter.
"We sit in the thicket and cry" tells a lot about not overcoming conflicts and about behavioral patterns that are not broken. Slaps fly, tears flow or forks get stuck in the cheek of the other person. The novel plays out variations of non-understanding.
One of the book's weaknesses is that its non-linear narrative, which repeatedly describes new confrontations between constantly changing protagonists in short chapters, makes it a little confusing. The fact that excursions into the Swiss part of the family, for example, also bring linguistic variety is one of its strengths. Swiss-German dialog is translated in the footnotes.
The author surprises us with a stylistic device: a daughter's eulogies to her father are interspersed time and again. Stylistically very different, they add up to a bitter reckoning, a reckoning between what happiness could have been and what actually became of it.
That really gets to you. And yet "We sit in the thicket and cry" doesn't leave you feeling hopeless. Better than sitting down and crying is to get up and do better.
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