“I don’t know any language for my body. (…) I speak a foreign language. Maybe that’s one of the reasons for writing, for this fragmented, crumbling writing. For the fact that only fragments come out of my hands, the edges of which are so so fragmented that you can’t build a beautiful, smooth, gripping, polished story out of it.”
Kim de l’Horizon’s “Blood Book” is definitely not mainstream. The language, the plot, the themes – nothing quite as you would expect from a conventional novel. If an author nevertheless manages to take the reader with him, captivate and touch him, then that is probably literature in the best sense of the word.
There is no plot as a completed story in the novel. The focus is on Kim, a person who, like Kim de l’Horizon, feels non-gendered. “(…) and this horror story of just two genders, of two infusible glaciers that are exactly opposites of each other, I won’t tell you any more,” Kim once wrote.
A text that is trendy
The book is an intense search for one’s own identity, often an indictment of the domineering grandmother, the callous mother (but never the absent father). It is a liberation, a kind of poetry of liberation, powerfully formulated in a precise language in which Kim de l’Horizon has palpably wrestled every word. Each sentence has been thought through and checked hundreds of times. No word comes by chance, every metaphor is correct.
But that doesn’t mean the text is easy to bear. The ruthless, sometimes brutal sex scenes are on the verge of being bearable, the page-long listing of Kim’s invented female ancestors or the cultural-historical explanations about the eponymous blood beech (also called “blood book” in Swiss) demand a lot from the reader.
The question remains: is “Blutbuch” really the novel of the year that the jury of the German Book Prize awarded it a week ago? Clearly, many aspects of the book are trendy. Autofictional writing is currently just as en vogue (as the Nobel Prize for Annie Ernaux shows) as is the topic of an open (non-binary) society. And it is also evident that the book industry wants idiosyncratic authors who can be sold well apart from the already profitable mass-produced goods.
Nevertheless, awarding the book prize to Kim de l’Horizon’s “Blood Book” is more than a (political) sign. It is an award for an extraordinary book and a person who has a lot to say.
Kim de l’Horizon: “Blood Book”, novel, DuMont-Verlag, 304 pages, 25.50 euros
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Source: Nachrichten
