Literature Addiction as a hiding place in "Forever Everything" by Jeannette Hunziker
In her debut novel "Für immer alles", Bernese author Jeannette Hunziker tells the story of how a young woman searches for the causes of her addiction. The reason for her intense self-questioning is the death of her father.
23.08.2024, 07:00
27.08.2024, 07:40
SDA
It is said that addiction is passed on from parents to children. Yet in the novel "Für immer alles", the alcoholic father is not the actual father of the first-person narrator. The news of his death comes as a surprise to the 38-year-old. She has long limited her relationship with him to infrequent visits. Nevertheless, his funeral concerns her.
The narrator takes the inventory of her father's legacy as an opportunity to ask herself questions. She begins to record memories of her father, mother and earlier family life, searching for the roots of her own behavior and her relationship to the world.
This protocol-like character is the hallmark of Jeannette Hunziker's debut novel. The author does not develop a continuous narrative. Instead, she layers the sometimes short, sometimes longer entries on top of each other or cuts them against each other. This gives her prose a tactile, raw quality.
The origin of the addiction remains unclear
Addictions are complicated, just like her relationship with a father with whom she shares no genes. When she was twelve, she found out that she was the child of an anonymous sperm donor. Even if her father's death does not touch the narrator deeply, an underlying empathy seeps into her memory.
Where her own addiction comes from, however, remains open. The narrator cannot, or does not want to, resolve it. Perhaps this is why her writing repeatedly comes to a standstill: "I lose the end of the sentences," she notes. She hides behind the brittle, "invented" language as well as behind the difficult relationship to her own body and its "grotesque thinness". The two symptoms combine without one being attributed to the other.
"Für immer alles" revolves intensely and intimately around "the silence, the shame, the empty spaces". Jeannette Hunziker presents a debut that does not seem entirely polished in formal terms, but does not want to be, so as not to mask the fragility of the material.
*This text by Beat Mazenauer, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
