Hohle Räume by Nora Schramm

 

Today I continue my never-ending journey through the world of contemporary German literature. 

Hohle Räume - in my translation, Hollow Spaces - by Nora Schramm is just another book about family and daughter´s emancipation. Helene visits her parents but what looks like a normal Christmas family visit turns to be a moderately painful acknowledging of moderately estranged family life.

If in the case of many contemporary books written by authors with a migration background it is recurrent to mention a criminal past and the complete teenage alienation, before refugiating in some artisty habits or even professional endeavours - my latest example is Als wir Schwäne waren by Behzad Karim Khan that writes well but insists in following a stereotype that as every stereotype eliminates a big chunk of reality; not all immigrant children are ending up in prison or as drug dealers and even in Neukölln who is by the way very gentrified people may do Abitur and go to law school - for the books written by German authors, expect to find a divorce-driven family and children refusing to have any contact with their parents. Love is alienating, parents are alienating, the separation is easy but during the year during which people are supposed to keep being married before separating they are haunted by unhappy holidays and sexless years. That´s why I love German crime stories much much more.

In Hohle Räume Helen is also faced with the divorce of her parents. Her father has an affair, her mother fell down the stairs and needs to hospital. The Pflegeschwester - in Germany one can partially adopt someone else´s children if the social services notice that their natural families are unfit to educate them - disappeared. She has her own life - in Berlin, where else ? where her mother wants to relocate too after divorce - in her countryside place of birth everything stays the same.

During the reading we are just brought from one hollow space to another, wandering through the memories and family stories. 

While the story development is minimal, the turns of the sentence and their structure is interesting, probably the only elements of the book that may really shake my interest once in a while.

I´ve read many appreciative reviews of the book and the book is not bad if you follow the narrative mindsets, but I will keep looking for more fiction that may really light my literary fire. Still waiting for.

Rating: 2.5 stars