German Book Review: Daheim by Judith Hermann

 

Daheim means largely home, but it involves in fact the feeling of belonging. Phenomenologically, it may be translated as ´the feeling of being at home´, of being part of a place. Of sharing something of more than a comfortable nature with a place. It is more than a construction which you can call home, a geographical address. It refers to a specific configuration of the soul. 

The woman character of Daheim by Judith Hermann is voicing a lack of belonging. Although she is decomposing and recomposing her emotional and physical environment she is experiencing on a daily basis. The people, and the pieces of furniture and the memories. 

Hermann, who read the audiobook I had access to, wrote short stories before and the talent to focus on the small stories of micro-events is visible. The book is made of small stories added to other small stories and encounters and everyday observations. It is one of those books where the voice of the storyteller matters more than the storytelling act in itself. There is a succession of banalities, small encounters from an average life. A woman who left everything behind and moved in the North of Germany, with a grown up daughter who moved away, writing letters to her ex-husband. Connected with other humans on a very random basis. 

I may be against this type of loneliness. I was talking with someone very dear to me the other day about how people in Western Europe or America are rather happy to set up walls and borders and ´me time´ and miss that deep feeling of friendship and connection that, indeed, may take away some of your personal time and space, but why are you living for? A life of loneliness and ´me time´? What´s the meaning of all this...

But I understood the type of loneliness featured in Daheim. It is rather an alienation, an unempathic daily life. All goes on, every day more or less the same, we go through life making simple observations, accounting for our small gesture, and one day all is gone, and we are gone and that´s no ´butterfly effect´ of our presence. 

There is nothing wrong with this book, and I appreciated to listen to it read by the author. But other people´s loneliness hurts too.

Rating: 3 stars