Muttersterben: Prosa

by Michael Lentz

Hard to find

Genres: Germany

185 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Michael Lentz is a German author, musician, and performer of experimental texts and sound poetry.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

November 16, 1944 - the German city of Düren's blackest day

Motherdeath - short story by German author Michael Lentz. Katy Derbyshire's English translation is available here: https://shortstoryproject.com/stories...

MOTHERDEATH
"Mother disappeared on the twentieth of August nineteen ninety-eight at around eleven fifty at night. At around eight thirty in the morning of the twenty-first of August nineteen ninety-eight, Father called and informed me: 'Mother died at around eleven fifty last night.' I went back to bed and continued reading the duck comic I had set aside the previous evening."

So begins the author's harrowing account.

Michael Lentz is renowned for delving into avenues that bring us closer to the reality of our physical, material world, which often eludes adequate expression through language. Perhaps this is why the time and date of his mother's death are reiterated in the opening lines. In essence, akin to minimalist music and its persistent repetition of a straightforward musical motif (consider pieces such as Philip Glass' "Music in Twelve Parts"), Michael Lentz utilizes repetition to intensify our understanding of his journey surrounding his mother's passing.

"It’s certainly the case that I last saw Mother at around ten in the morning on the sixth of July nineteen ninety-eight. I wave back again and the heavy grey door with the handle rubbed smooth to the touch slips slowly and safely closed. On this ward, a broken foot lies next to death. Everyone leaves via the corridor. Mother is having difficulties with her tongue but her voice is unupset. She is having trouble swallowing and has to drink artificial saliva."

Once more, Michael Lentz aims to delve into the essence, the precise reality, of experiencing being present in that room with its heavy gray door, handle worn smooth, watching his dying mother for the last time, his mother enduring such acute suffering that swallowing becomes arduous, necessitating the consumption of artificial saliva.

This autofiction serves as a reminder to English readers of Karl Ove Knausgård. Michael Lint writes autofiction with a specific purpose: the German author, known for his experimentalism, strives for a reality that is more immediate, more dynamic, and more authentically raw than traditional fiction.

"Now at last I rest my hand with no pressure on the blanket, beneath it her absolutely emaciated legs. Intuiting legs. She is so gaunt that the tendons in her neck grow out of her body like dry branches so gaunt. Her larynx protrudes as though it wanted to be alone. Her arms threaten to snap away, her whole body an ungoverned marionette whose strings somebody tangled."

This is just a snippet from a long paragraph. We're closely following the sensitive, twenty-four years old narrator as he vividly describes everything he observes. Pay attention to his description of his mother, whose "whole body an ungoverned marionette with tangled strings," which is a metaphor rather than a simile, making it more direct, more powerful. The scene, which is agonizingly intense, concludes with him realizing that he never asked his mother if she was contemplating death. He is acutely aware of how close his mother is to dying.

"Mother was not from this society. I think she was from the war, and she compared everything to its equivalent from the war. There weren’t many exact equivalents. She didn’t bring up her children at the level of society, I mean this society was always in the way of her bringing us up, I mean this society was always in her way."

After her death, the narrator reflects on the trauma his mother likely endured during the war, witnessing the devastation of her hometown, Düren. With bitter irony, he muses, "A town ninety-eight per cent destroyed in the war, ought never to have been rebuilt. They should have left it all as it was to rot away. Then they could have taken people and women from all over the world there fifty years after the war and said: THAT is war."

"German grammar always emits such an extreme stench of decay. This permanently papally blessed German language. This bargain language. This philosopher’s language. This money-back deposit bottle of a language."

It sounds like the narrator (and perhaps author Michael Lentz) has lost faith in his native language. If language no longer can be trusted to express our deepest, most intimate emotions, what does this say about our inner lives? Additionally, how reliable is our memory? Can works of a high literary standard come to our aid? Questions and ideas to keep in mind as your read this heart-wrenching tale of Michael Lentz.


Michael Lentz, born 1964

[Ahn Hundt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I became aware of Michael Lentz through the hyped-up translation of his 1001-page opus ‘Schattenfroh’, but before I fully committed to such a long work, I wanted to dip my toes into what Lentz is able to achieve in a smaller capacity through his writing. ‘Muttersterben/Motherdying’ is an unbelievable collection of short stories or prose fragments that are mainly about stylistic experimentation and linguistic playfulness rather than creating full cohesive narratives or concrete plots. These are all written in a purposeful sequence that connects back to what was displayed previously in a story, either through thematic links, story callbacks or stylistic reference. What he is able to do with his sort of rhythmic stream-of-consciousness consisting of raw emotion, rich poetics or pun-comedy is sort of marvelous, especially in how he is able to capture such a dark and deeply moving topic in ways that can go from extremely hilarious to utterly heartbreaking from one page to the next.

Not all fragments here work entirely well, but they manage to enrich the whole and make the longer passages even more effective. Especially that last titular part was endlessly beautiful, bleakly tragic and gut-wrenching that it felt like one of the greatest literary attempts at understanding grief (or at least an attempt at capturing how impossible it is to understand grief). I cannot stress enough how amazing it is to know that there are German writers like him that still feel inventive, creative and singular in the current day. This is such an intentful and complex collection of prose, I love just how entertaining and yet deep-cutting it can be, it’s not perfect and I’d imagine him maturing and evolving this style over time with his ‘Schattenfroh’ now (which I’m eager to read soon), but he is such an underrated figure in literature today.

[Squire · Rating 5 out of 5]

"This must be a plot. Something is happening here."

Muttersterben: Prosa won the Ingeborge Bachmman for a then-unpublished short story. Motherdying is the English translation of that work as the centerpiece of this collection of five experimental prose pieces, tone poems and stories all centered around meditions upon the death of the author's mother.

As in Scattenfroh, Lentz plays with words and sounds as he struggles with watching his mother wither away before him; and he questions whether or not his mother's hometown of Duren, Germany should have been rebuilt after WWII in order to give the survivors (and the survivors' decendants) a chance at a life not consumed by decay.

It's difficult to describe this avant-garde autofiction except to say that it leaves the reader with more questions than answers.

"Death is expected sometime between now and tomorrow. Death is punctual. Mother, sixtyeight years old."

[Sebastiaan Buts · Rating 2 out of 5]

Laat ons zeggen dat deze review met een korrel zout moet genomen worden. Ik lees een Engelse vertaling en niet het originele Duits.

Dit boek leest voor mij als woorden achter elkaar gezet in een volgorde. De zinnen klinken ijdel en vormen geen geheel. Ik kan jammer genoeg niet geraakt worden of een nut zien in dit “Motherdying” hoe tragisch dat ook mag zijn. En dat is misschien ook het punt… er is geen nut aan deze sterfte.

Ik krijg enkel van moeder een duivels en angstig gevoel en dat draagt de ziekte die zij heeft misschien mee.

Moeders verdienen een meer positief licht of een sprankel hoop in literatuur naar mijn menig.

[Darryl Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written with a very poetic style. the first half of the book borders on an emotional stream of consciousness and eventually resolves into something coherent. The main drawback is that it says nothing profound and offers no perspective that resonated with me. In that way it felt merely like a self-indulgent reflection on the author's own experience.

[William Zong · Rating 4 out of 5]

there are some very beautiful moments that strike right to the heart of the matter so to speak but at other times the translation feels like a stilted sieve and im left wondering what im missing may my family and i die quickly and easily godwilling

[Carolina Silva Rodé]

Este wey escribió un libro madremuerta y es del 15 de mayo. Si yo creyera en estos esoterismos………

[Lal Kösematoglu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not for everyone but it really worked for me

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

No I don’t know German I read the English translation I’m a fraud I’m sorry 😔