“My Father” by Monika Helfer. Edhasa, 162 pgs. $3,950.
“If you look at a library you can know everything about the person to whom it belongs,” says the father who gives the title to this new book by Monika HelferAustrian writer leading figure in current German-language literature.
The novel has just arrived on the news table in bookstores and it is a new chapter in the family history that Helfer began to recount in a previous text, “The last”also published in Spanish by the Edhasa label and translated by Gabriela Adamo and its greatest success to date.
For “Papi”, the literary version of Helfer’s real father and protagonist of the novel, books are paradise and curse. Crippled in the war, son of a maiden maid, he figures in the most iconic object of high culture, the sum of his ambitions when it comes to social advancement.
The story of Josef (that’s his name) is that of a library, that of the Recovery Establishment for War Disabled, a place in the mountains of Austria that he has to manage and where the family (mother, father, aunt and three children, Monika included) will live the brightest and most stable period of their lives. It is the end of the war, the world gradually recovers order and everyone is looking for a context to rebuild themselves.
“My father” is, at the same time, the investigation of a daughter to discover those unknown motives, that the innocence of childhood grows, that made Josef who he was. “When you know a person all your life and only at the end do you find out who he really is, it can be something difficult to bear,” says the author in one of the key phrases of the text.
The novel, like any family story, navigates between drama and irony. The conversations with the sister to confront memories are a classic in which we can all feel recognized. The sense of humor is a constant that lightens nostalgia and duels.
Monica Helfer was awarded the Robert Musil Scholarship, the Austrian Prize for Literature and, for “The Last Ones”, she won the Schubart Prize for Literature in 2021. She was born in 1947, lives in Vorarlberg, Austria, and her dream as a child was ( that is at least what he replied to his father when he asked him about his wishes) “that sometime on the back of a book say my name.”
The recommended
“Lost Tourists” by Gustavo Yuste. Editions B, 144 pgs. $3,699.
With the compass of an approximation, the narrator of “Lost Tourists” revolves around A challenge: the separation from your partner. And as all mourning is uncertain, writing this novel It begins with minimal reflections on the present of the break, until finding a broader rhythm to describe the details of the past. Moving boxes are symbolic: what is kept and what is forgotten at the end of an important relationship. Yuste hits with the containment of tone. Short phrases, everyday words, absence of metaphors. Everything that is not said is the immense penalty of what was lost and cannot be recovered.
Releases
The frozen woman of Annie Ernaux. Cabaret Voltaire, 232 pgs. $4,390
Luckily, the work of Ernaux, Nobel Prize for Literature 2022, is being edited and translated in its entirety into Spanish. Now comes “The Frozen Woman”, one of his best novels, autobiographical like all his texts. In it, she recounts her years as a young wife and mother, whose desire is crushed by the routine of marriage and family. Honest, almost brutal, like everything about her.
Love from Juan José Becerra. Seix Barral, 454 pgs. $7,200
The story is told in the year 2123, when books and love have disappeared. A compiler (Becerra himself) presents a set of texts that account for the relationship between a man and a woman in the 21st century. Testimonials, news, newspapers, make up a collage where distance is the narrative secret. Becerra is one of the best Argentine writers and “Love” a good starting point to start reading it.
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Source: Yenny and El Ateneo bookstores.
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