Angelika Klüssendorf

There are only a few hopeful moments in this book. And what is worse, the girl whose name we are not told, who is twelve at the beginning, learns to protect herself against hope as if it were a malignant disease. Because hope is followed by disappointment and new injury as surely as night follows day. So she decides "that travelling anywhere hopefully is something that will never happen to her again”. When she runs away from home and from her completely unpredictable, brutal mother, or later when she runs away from the children’s home because, crazy though it may be, she is homesick, she does so only to go somewhere secure, not because she expects anything to be better anywhere else. (…) The authorial narrative voice offers no redeeming distance. That makes this novel very hermetic, however, and one cannot escape its power. One event follows another, and one disaster follows another – that is the course of events. Perhaps the book has to end so abruptly because there can be no end to this fateful chain of events. The girl is 17 and is doing an apprenticeship in an agricultural production cooperative to become a cattle breeder. But right from the outset it seems unlikely that anything will come of it. One would like to know what the future holds for her.

Jörg Magenau: „Hoffnung wäre nur eine weitere Falle gewesen“
© die tageszeitung, 24 September 2011