Translated by: Jamie Lee Searle
Kim de l’Horizon’s Blood Book: a tapestry still in progress

By Ciara Bowen

In a world increasingly hostile to visions of gender beyond the binary, Blood Book is propelled by a desire to create something new instead of begrudgingly picking between the options society has laid out for you. De l’Horizon plays with the limits of language and expression, reminiscent of the themes in Akwaeke Emezi’s gutsy, magical The Death of Vivek Oji, a New York Times bestseller which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. 

Online discussion of Blood Book has clutched onto clickbait headlines about identity and gender in the German language ever since de l’Horizon won several book prizes in 2022, stealing the limelight from the novel itself – a beautifully experimental, far-reaching novel. The author refuses to neatly tie up the novel’s many threads by the final page; instead, Blood Book asks us to accept that the tapestry is still - and always - in progress. 

The five-part novel follows a gender-fluid protagonist, Kim, who writes imaginary letters to their grandmother as her dementia progresses. Much of the book concerns Kim’s often strained relationship with their mother and grandmother, and as Kim begins to research their maternal family tree, the voices of their ancestors grow into a chorus of women. The lives of these women have been devastated by the forces of patriarchy in different ways: from Sofia Ferarri, a herbalist accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake in the 1600s, to Irma Sägesser, sent to prison for becoming pregnant while unmarried in the 1900s. These women drive the novel and shape Kim themself, who, in defiance of the cycle of trauma that has marked their life so far, refuses to capitulate to the inherited family shame. Afloat on the sea of the queer ancestors who could not be their true selves, Kim refuses to be repressed; they have a choice, where their ancestors did not. By putting these ancestors’ lives into words, by bringing their past into the present, de l’Horizon’s autofictional narrator breaks the curse of silence. 

The novel’s fractured structure and experimental style reflects experiences outwith the rigid constructs of gender – unbounded, untethered, free. Drastic stylistic changes between the book’s parts fly in the face of convention: while the recollections of childhood often feel dreamlike and far away, this fairytale-like quality gives way to more sober prose as Kim is confronted with the harsh realities of life in a capitalist society. 

Searle, the translator, elegantly plays with language and, encouraged by de l’Horizon during a residency in Switzerland, looks beyond the rulebooks of language with her solutions. To me, this is a novel that was meant to be translated, recreated – de l’Horizon’s experiments with form and style demand a similarly fluid, bold translation. The original played with German’s strict gender constructs, and while gender plays a less inherent role in the English language, Searle cleverly manipulates the language to produce a similar effect–a feeling of breaking free from the chains of standardised language. 

Blood Book gathers the threads of past and present, weaving them into a new future. As de l’Horizon puts it, “The lessons of the blood beech were: Stand there. Shed your leaves. Endure. Create new foliage. Come into leaf. Transform.” 

Approximate Reading Time:  3 minutes