After Winternähe, I couldn´t wait for the next novel by Mirna Funk. As a passive follower on social media, I watch her energy in approaching tabu topics related to Jewish life in Germany - not only antisemitism - and her intense journalistic activity. She is not the only one, but always feel good to live in a society where there are young resilient voices.
Zwischen Du und Ich - Between You and Me - her newest novel, was worth waiting for. The writing is refined and the plot development gained in complexity. The characters - both the main and the secondary - do have stronger, relatable personality. Lola, the character from Winternähe, is also worth a sentence and a bit in the new book. A hint that maybe she is thinking those books as episodes of German Jewish life?
As in Winternähe, there is a personal plan which naturally interferes with historical encounters, but what really matters this time is the individual story. Nike is a 35 years old German Jewess, who grew up in East Berlin in a secular family. She decided to take a job opportunity of organising a DAAD conference in Israeli while making her aliyah. There she will hook up with Noam, a rather fluid character, a journalist writing for Haaretz - we all know that Germans will rather care about such a reference, Gd forbid to write for, let´s say Jerusalem Post...until he left.
Both characters are worth a novel but their match was not my best scenario. Honestly, I will not waste a bet on their chances. But what attracts them is a shared trauma and the plot is rather developed to prove how trauma attracts trauma, with all the gratuitous sexual and urologic symptoms and references. At to a certain point I will admit that, indeed, someone with a traumatic past will rather enjoy the company of someone with a shared grief but relationships are much more complex and less casual and with a healing effect too. Smart people with a traumatic past maybe will rather enjoy the company of someone with a less or absent generational suffering. But otherwise trauma ends by controlling us, our future, present and relationships and it´s hard to escape it. Rather, it adds up more along the journey which complicates the DNA structure even more.
But despite those references and failures and the exhibitionism, Zwischen Du und Ich reads very well, the mathematical kind of writing which pondered words and effects creating an unique story. I never read something like that before in German language, because no one had the easiness of doing so as Mirna Funk. It´s such a fresh writing and topic that the eventual misfits are in fact a good sign. A hope that soon, in one or two years, she will write another book. I can´t wait to.
Rating: 3.5 stars
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