“Five Kopecks” by Sarah Stricker

Sarah Stricker’s debut novel “Five kopeks” is the confession of a dying man, the last in the days of her life blossoms, drops her mask, solves its longstanding silence and her daughter discloses a well-kept secret – less than confidence than as self-discovery and self-affirmation. Anna is more than its mouthpiece; she says, commented the heard of wit and often biting irony. Thus, the color image is formed of a family whose elderly members rather plain, but were different. The great-grandparents: pale.

The grandparents’. A lovely couple just stand out plus and minus up on each other. ” The mother gray on the surface, but deep beneath bright red. And the daughter of Anna?

“Five kopecks” was awarded in January as the best first novel of 2013 with the highly doped Mara Cassens Prize of the Association House of Literature Hamburg. A great piece of literature by an author that you should keep in mind.

Mother and daughter give each other a good word.

Bluntly worded Anna: “My mother was very ugly Dürr … pale … pointed chin … nor her mouth … blind as a fish..” She never mentions her name. And her mother spent years tied each on the nose that her Anna “was an accident, one of the worst kind” and “no children she that actually had wanted.” Anna can remember that “[her mother] said that she loves me”.

And distant But as cold as it seems at first “exactly once”, is the daughter-mother relationship not that Sarah Stricker unfolds “five kopecks” in her debut novel.

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Because they understand and need each other. Now has brought its fifty-year cancer-stricken mother to his home in order to maintain in their last phase of life, the budding journalist Anna. Peculiar changes pose a Where she can hardly stand up and Anna, they “had to feed with a spoon, it was nice at one time”. The woman, given for it is only as “future”, which had never been reported in the past, suddenly begins to tell, “talked and talked and talked.” my grandfather you never “Everything else would Anna listens and becomes the chronicler of her mother while they themselves largely stays in the background

Anna indicated already in its second sentence the determining factor in the life of her mother. “allowed; “Much to laugh she had not.” She was the only child of her parents Oscar and Hilda Schneider. The Schneider family is “tiny nest” in a home in Palatine. they earn their living as automotive, plumbing and electrical craftsmen. Only the brothers Oscar and Helmut visit a school. however, Hilde comes from good Berlin house. The only her family survived the air raids in 1943, but could by littenen during the war fears never take more. Afraid of everything and everyone remained her “first and only true love.” A cousin in Oskars village takes the bombed-out young woman, and so she meets Oskar. Whose mother is very impressed by “the good upbringing that brought my grandmother to her” …

After the death of his father (Anna’s great-grandfather) Oskar takes over the dry goods store and turns the small boutique “Mode cutters “within a few years a flourishing empire. How to build such a business, how to get to the top – “big, bigger, biggest, definitely larger than anything that there have been” – that and more, he has 1,944 on the Volga and in the POW camp Kazan ( “the source of all good in his life”) learned. Even with 19 years grandfather was an officer, and the annual “39 to 45” were “the best of his life.” There he met, “can mean death standstill” that, that you can catch a nasty virus called idleness, which one escapes only through continuous movement. And so he lived his wife and daughter every day: “He did not, he ran, he did not go, he raced He did not think he knew above all:…. Better” He was one of the makers that made the economic miracle and benefited from it.

In this air cooler success orientation grows Anna’s mother. at least bored is “under maximum penalty”; “Leisure” (the evil “F-word”) drops if necessary in conjunction with “those despicable creatures out there,” fritter away the hours in cafes or on lawns. Fortunately, the girl is highly intelligent and has a lot of talents. Something else would have hardly pass grandfather. “My mother was too ugly to be stupid.” Whether drawing, gymnastics, music – it cleans up the trophies, win the medals. This is not a matter of luck, but hard work. “A price no pain” would be unbearable for grandfather.

On the route remains Mutters youth.. She hates it when her peers with her foolish rebelliousness, the silly whispers and giggles. The changes of their own bodies they interfere, “wires and tubes in its interior, the heated uncontrollably, the blood to her cheeks exaggerated”. For tender love ( “kuhäugig gurgling happiness”) lacks any talent, and anyway: “Butterflies … do not belong in the stomach”.

After the wall came down, the cutter move to Berlin, where “fashion Schneider “continues to grow. Anna’s mother studied medicine and helps in the remaining hours of the day to build new stores. Sleep can be deleted quiet times.

Since she remembers Arno with his “unconditional love” as simple “in your lap.” But they can not fall to not feel once attracted right to him. She wants to “earn … as a reward for all the effort they had given themselves to be the one that she was” him as a man for life. however, is enthusiastic grandfather; he was “about to make a marriage proposal to my father.”

All this without comment Anna has recorded and played with more lenient distance. Behind the superficial sense of humor is often in deep melancholy. Because empathy did not exist, and when they came up yet, it was nipped in the bud. How could mother brought up to feel cold, her daughter can give warmth?

Now, Anna is confronted with things that do not really want to know about her mother a daughter. Shortly before the scheduled wedding date learns mother the Russians know Alex, whose good luck charm is the title of the book, and forfeit his body and soul. With it, she lives out everything “to her did not want to trust”: lust and sex, lust and passion. Now they have to “say out loud to make sure that she had not only devised the woman all these years had lived on only in memory of her” all this finally. Anna logged and “stamped her everything down, every single scene,” and that’s over a hundred pages partly strong stuff.