Barbara Schibli writes about a world of possibilities
Published: Friday, Sep 6th 2024, 11:10
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In her second novel "Flimmern im Ohr", Aargau author Barbara Schibli has her main character Priska struggle with many upheavals between the houseplants of her long-term partner Bengt: The menopause, the relationship has become a habit and she has to retrain herself to hear because she has had a cochlear implant, an electrically operated inner ear prosthesis, for a few months.
What is sold as a simple solution actually requires a lot of patience: Priska's brain first has to relearn how to hear with the implant. Her old records from the 1970s and 1980s still sound flat, monotonous and rattling. Along with the music, the themes of the time flicker to the fore: the club scene, the fiche affair, the women's movement, equal rights and youth. And Gina. Priska longs for love, for the self-confidence and solidarity of the time and wants to feel sexy again.
In the appendix, author Schibli, who was born in 1975, refers to a lot of research material. And this work unfortunately reads as well. The dynamics of the club scene and the women's movement are dealt with historically rather than experienced. They remain a backdrop. Perhaps also because Priska herself was more on the fringes of the movement and observes, not without scepticism, how Gina appears to be becoming more and more radicalized. Unsettled by this development, she repeatedly contacts Gina's ex-girlfriend, the journalist Lisa.
Priska, and therefore the focus of the narrative world, turns away from the polarized society or the genesis of radicalization and loses herself in compromises. The two narrative strands at the end of the 1970s and in 2010 are connected by the records, by the second fiche affair and by another oil spill. Between the two strands lies an accident, the apparent vanishing point of the narrative. And a longing for freedom, although Priska doesn't really seem to know what this could look like in the present.
*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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