Seltsame Materie

This is actually a book I read as an alternative since I couldn’t get her latest novel I was really interested in. Terézia Mora is from Hungary but has been living in Germany for along time and she writes in German. in 1999 she won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Award and I believe the short story collection presented in “Seltsame Materie” is from that era. A friend of mine stopped in the middle of the book since the language and the style were to experimental fro him. In fact you need a lot of background knowledge to fill the gaps Mora leaves in the text. The stories are rooted in an Hungarian region close to the Austrian border. The village is located at the shores of a swampy lake. The border – back then part of the Iron Curtain- plays a major role in almost all stories. But also incest, violences, drunken villages, survival, ruthlessness – all that with the ingredient of vulnerability. First it was really hard to get into these stories – at the end I submerged into this archaic world.