#RivetingReviews: Mandy Wight reviews HALF SWIMMER by Katja Oskamp
Katja Oskamp won the Dublin Literary Award in 2023 with her book Marzahn Mon Amour, the story of a writer-turned-chiropodist working in Marzahn, the biggest housing estate in formerly communist East Berlin. Half Swimmer, also set in East Berlin, is a collection of linked short stories, told by a first-person narrator, which together form a kind of coming-of-age novel – we’re told in a preface note that ‘Halbschwimmer’ is a ‘German term for one who has recently learned to swim but hasn’t yet mastered the technique’.
In the first few stories we see Tanja in early puberty, trying to make sense of the adult world around her. She interleaves an account of swimming in the Baltic with an incident when she woke to the sound of creaking from her parents’ bedroom. Crawling along to see what was happening, she sees her Dad’s shoulder blades rising up and down in the ‘white, choppy waves’of the duvet, coming up to the surface every few breaths, gasping for air.In the story ‘Herr O’ she comes home from school early to find her mother in the sitting room, shuffling papers around with her colleague, Herr O, the air thick with the smell of Duett cigarettes and Undine Green Air Freshener, an empty bottle of Rotkäppchen on the table. Are they having an affair?
While there’s gentle humour in the child’s take on the adult world, there are unsettling elements too. In ‘Rolf and Hopsi’shevisits their neighbour, Uncle Rolf, who ruffles her hair and makes a fuss of her, touching her ribs ‘somewhere near my breast’as she eats the chocolate he gives her. Then we see her father in ‘Half Swimmer’, determined she should learn to dive with her eyes open, grasping her wrist and ankle, pushing her down beneath the water. ‘He’s baring his teeth, but he’s not laughing’.
Often this disturbing feeling derives from our knowledge of the East German regime. In ‘The Letter’, Tanja writes to the Ministry of Education to let them know there’s information missing from the history text books. For example, their teacher told them about the trucks the party sent to the countryside to play Russian marching music to the farmers until they agreed to join the cooperative, ‘worn down but united’. While her parents and teachers are worried about the repercussions of her letter, the man from the Ministry reacts rather mildly, encouraging Tanja to write to him again with any concerns.
As well as hinting at the ideology underpinning adult life, Katja Oskamp describes vividly the physical environment of East Germany. In one of my favourite stories, ‘Ruckedigu’, Tanja visits her grandparents, who live right by the steelworks: ‘the grey sky, the top of the dirty concrete wall which enclosed the steelworks like a thick, heavy belt’. Despite this gloomy setting, her grandparents are a cheerful couple with a sense of fun: they love nothing more than an outing in their mobility vehicle, ‘a cube on three legs’, which grandpa has sprayed a ‘blueish-grey shade’ and fixed up with a Trabant roof, their little granddaughter Tanja squeezed onto a footstool at grandma’s feet. Grandma tells her that when grandpa returned from the war, pigeon racing was his ‘be all and end all’.Tanja loves visiting his pigeon loft, watching the birds as ‘they strutted over the wood on their scrawny legs like wind-up toy soldiers, they skittered about on clawed feet the colour of bruises’.
My other favourite story, ‘What Custom Strictly Divided’, takes place in the very different but iconic space of Berlin’s Palace of the Republic. It’s New Year’s Eve, a concert performance of Beethoven’s Ninth, and the great and the good of East Berlin are present in their finery, including Tanja’s parents, her mother in her suit with the ‘subtle floral pattern’ and ‘shimmering silvery high shoes’ to match, her father only just persuaded not to wear his military dress uniform. Sadly not dressed for the occasion are Tanja and her boyfriend, Karl, in his denim fur-lined jacket and jeans. He’s forty-eight, an actor, from a decidedly different, bohemian milieu, which leads Tanja to reflect on the text of ‘Ode to Joy’ and its call to unity. How can people ‘become brothers’ when their individual lives and tastes are so very different?
This story is a sort of turning point in the collection. The last three stories recount Tanja’s life independent of her parents as a young adult in the bohemian theatre milieu of East Germany. We learn more about her relationship with Karl, and there are some wonderfully comic descriptions of the East German concert audience – including an older woman ‘encased in a giant golden ruffle right up to her double chin, just like those fancy chocolates by the name of Rocher’. The last story, ‘Back on Speaking Terms’, is more sober. At a funeral of a deceased actor, his friend, with whom he’d fallen out, gives a moving eulogy. At the same time, Tanja is surprised to sense, through her tears, her father walking alongside her to the grave. We’re taken right back to that military man who grabbed her by the wrist all those years ago.
I really enjoyed this collection. Lighter than some fiction from East Germany with its gentle humour, it depicts the pain and misunderstandings of growing up in a way we can all relate to. Yet the ideological context of communist East Germany often surfaces, and gives the stories a darker tone.
Reviewed by Mandy Wight
HALF SWIMMER
Written by Katja Oskamp
Translated by Jo Heinrich
Published by Peirene Press (2024)
September 2024 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.
Mandy Wight has published several translations from German on the No-Mans-Land Website, including excerpts from novels by Ursula Krechel, Nina Jäckle, Ulrike Edschmid, Natascha Wodin and Monika Helfer. In 2018 she was awarded the Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation for her translation of an extract from Juli Zeh’s novel Unterleuten. She writes on books in English and in translation at her blog Peakreads.
Read Mandy Wight’s #RivetingReview of FORGOTTENNESS by Tanja Maljartschuk
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