#RivetingReviews: Katie Whittemore reviews WITHOUT WAKING UP by Carolina Schutti

Without Waking Up by Austrian writer Carolina Schutti and translated by Deirdre McMahon was the second title to be published by the Irish indie Bullaun Press, the only press in Ireland dedicated exclusively to literature in translation. The novel was the winner of the 2015 European Literature Prize; it’s an intimate and elliptical story of an orphan, Maja, and her search for a literal and an emotional homeland. Like her beloved Matryoshka doll, pieces of Maja’s story are nested inside one another, each an incomplete layer comprising a whole that we come to sense but never fully grasp. The structure of incomplete impressions from Maja’s childhood, budding adolescence, young womanhood, and motherhood provides the novel’s general themes of displacement, loss, and memory to stirring effect.

After her mother dies when she is a young child, Maja’s father, whom she hasn’t known, comes for her at the Belarussian orphanage and takes her back to his country (which is left unnamed, but is likely either Austria or Germany) and leaves her to be raised in the care of his own dutiful but emotionally distant aunt. Young Maja quietly grapples with her grief and confusion over the death of her mother, as well as her mother tongue, and this sets up the novel’s recurring motif – the search for an elusive identity, agency, and one’s deepest roots: not only through a connection with place but with language. I lost my language along with my mother: the falling-sleep phrases, the comforting phrases, this cradle-rocking of words, our language island where there was just enough room for the two of us …

The senses are front and center in this writing and these descriptions are what bring Maja’s world alive, given that we aren’t privy to any full explanations or details. The night sky stretching tightly over the valley; dust tastes like sugar; her bed a feathery cave; the bread so fresh it melts on the tongue; a row of trees give way to thousand-year-old forests lying on the land like thick bison hides, covered in scars. I take my hat off to translator Deidre McMahon (this is, incidentally, her first full-length literary translation) for her truly beautiful rendering of Schutti’s prose and carefully crafted imagery.

As the book moves towards its close, we find Maja as a young mother on the long train journey to Belarus with own baby daughter. As they transit through various countries and cross physical and political borders, Maja both travels back in memory and projects herself into an imagined future where there exists some possible resolution to the absences that have plagued her all her life, finally connecting both herself and her daughter to their matrilineage and reaching the integral kernel, the last and smallest doll, that cannot be broken open and remains whole. But Schutti frustrates any neat conclusions, and we are left unsure of what Maja will find when she finally reaches her origins. 

Reviewed by Katie Whittemore

WITHOUT WAKING UP

Written by Carolina Schutti

Translated from the German by Deirdre McMahon

Published by Bullaun Press (2023)

December 2024 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

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Katie Whittemore is a literary translator from Spanish. Her most recent translations include Bad Handwriting by Sara Mesa, Mothers Don’t by Katixa Agirre and Wolfskin by Lara Moreno. She lives in Valencia, Spain.