Marriages in Review: The New Novels by Kirchhoff and Brinkgreve

A, the man she was with for forty years has died. And the book she wrote is one about grief and love, but she suffered the loss long before her husband’s death. She is always amazed at what she sees now that she is really looking. The further she digs, the clearer it becomes how difficult the beginnings of this marriage were. And she manages to delve so deeply into this confrontation with herself that she can honestly write about her depressed, narcissistic, self-pitying, but also entertaining husband at the time, without betraying him. Because she doesn’t blame him and doesn’t shirk responsibility, but keeps asking herself, why did you let this happen to you?

How can it be that you were this woman, so weak and fearful in this relationship, when you were otherwise completely different outside in life? “Above all, I have to look at myself,” she writes, “and our interaction. It’s not about guilt and victimhood, but the painful shouldn’t be glossed over either.” She remembers how the basement of the house filled with water. She would have liked to change something about it, he resisted, she accepted it, the cellar became more and more crowded, the door to the cellar remained closed. “Knowing it and keeping the door closed: for me that symbolizes our way of life back then.”

When you have children, you lose your wife, he complains

She is a doctoral student in sociology and he is a trained lawyer and practicing journalist when they meet. He admires their independence, their cleverness, their success. She admires his way of thinking and formulating, his insight and his passion for music. “We were very interested in each other’s worlds, including the inner world full of fear and melancholy. It was a form of intimacy that was new to me and that I liked.” He moves in with her but doesn’t like her house. Although she loves it very much, she gives it up and together they move into a house that he likes, the house that she is now rearranging.

His daughters from his first marriage will be there a lot, she has two sons with A, she likes to cook a lot, the house is full of friends and family. But he soon feels neglected and complains about losing his wife when he has children. She gets angry. “I stormed out of restaurants, got out of cars, raged. That gave me relief, but led to the opposite for him. He perceived me as an exploding boiler and withdrew even more. His fear of exploding women was great: it caused internal devastation.” The many people who once enlivened the house are staying away. What remains are two people who sat in their separate rooms and wrote each other emails.

Terese and Viktor have also become strangers to each other in their marriage, almost indifferent to each other

Christien Brinkgreve is a professor of women’s studies, and so it naturally dismays her that even she couldn’t free herself from the “tough patterns of dominance and submission.” “The latter concerns me very much. Despite years of feminist struggle, this deep layer has remained almost intact. I see these patterns everywhere: how women give in, adapt, support, give the space that they themselves do not demand.” She didn’t come against him, she said to a friend after his death. The girlfriend says no one came against him. Someone else asks her whether there is life after A. Yes, she says hesitantly, but the rest she can only think, the honest answer wouldn’t be appropriate: that parts of her have only come back to life since he’s dead.

Terese and Viktor in the novel with the brilliant title “Close-ups of a Woman Who Moves Away” by the German writer Bodo Kirchhoff have also become strangers to each other in their marriage, almost indifferent to each other. And Terese also comes back to life when she walks away from her husband. Terese, called Tess, has been together with Viktor, called Vigo, for more than forty years. They were once hippies, now they live middle-class lives in Frankfurt and traditionally celebrate New Year’s Eve with four other old 1968 couples.

Vigo, former head of a pacifist think tank, is writing a book about a world without weapons in retirement and is flying to India, whether for research or to visit a lover, he leaves that open. Tess, a child and adolescent therapist, travels after him, more out of anger than worry, and tries to find him, but he is always gone by the time she gets anywhere. She meets Rana, half Indian, half German. Rana runs the guesthouse where she lives and is younger than her. She and Rana have sex, and it’s actually refreshing when a woman over 60 isn’t seen as post-sexual, especially when the author or narrator is a man.

Because Kirchhoff has his protagonist Vigo sit at the dinner table in Frankfurt writing and recapitulate what Tess experiences and feels in India. And he lets him look back at other scenes of their marriage, for example how Tess had an affair with her doctoral supervisor for a few years and, at least that’s how it comes across, neglected their child. It looks as if Bodo Kirchhoff, who has written so many fine, clever novels about love and relationships of his generation, wanted to tell the story of a woman who is beautiful and self-confident and courageous and still desirable despite her age, but the woman seems more moody, superficial and self-righteous with every page. You’re constantly finding out what she’s wearing and how good she looks. “She wants to call Rana, to hear that he exists and therefore she too, she looks in the mirror at someone who has black things on them.” You find out how much taxi she drives and what she eats on the streets of Mumbai.

What we don’t find out, not really at least, is what she finds in the young man, apart from the fact that he desires her and has full, shiny black hair (of course Vigo can’t keep up with that). But of course, it’s Vigo who writes about his wife, and so Tess becomes a not-too-complex female figure from the perspective of a man who is abandoned and, in a certain way, settles accounts with her. At least Vigo has the greatness to write about himself in a somewhat self-ironic way. The most entertaining scene in the novel is a family meeting in a traditional London teahouse, arranged by Ava, their daughter, who works as a banker in London, values ​​money and conventions and thus poses challenges for the parents, especially Tess.

It’s frightening how heartlessly Tess views her daughter, and it’s really funny and tragic how childish and clumsy the parents behave at this meeting, and it’s all certainly just as intended by Bodo Kirchhoff. However, the parents and the daughter and the surprise that she brings them are so cliched that you can’t really take them seriously. And at some point you give up hope that someone will honestly judge themselves and the relationship that couldn’t have existed for so long for nothing. Because no one is looking, at least not really.