Not everything has to end with a bang, or at least with clarity. The puzzle is not always solved in the end, and you do not always know whether you are dealing with a puzzle at all. Welcome to reality and welcome to the world as Eva Schmidt describes it. “The world opposite” is the name of her new volume of stories, which lets us participate in observations that are actually quite everyday. However, the accuracy of their description is not commonplace.
Image: APA (archive image)
The Vorarlberg author Eva Schmidt (69) made a brilliant comeback in the literary world in 2016 with her book “A Long Year” – her first in almost two decades. Her episode novel consisting of 38 individual stories of (small) urban life made it onto the shortlist of the German Book Prize, which she succeeded again three years later with “The Untalented Liar”. What was true at the time remains valid: “Eva Schmidt is right in the middle of it all. And yet remains ostentatiously unaffected by all of this.
It is the people vis-a-vis or the newly moved neighbors who like to be the focus of observations, which rarely turn into speculations: strangers who come strangely close to us just through closer inspection. Occasionally, however, people close to you suddenly become strange: for example, when you find a weapon hidden by them. “Do you want to shoot me?” This question, which is not meant to be taken seriously, is in two stories in the room, and you don't have to know the Austrian crime statistics in detail to know that these questions are directed by women to men.
Occasionally one can well imagine the tragedy or the violence at the end, but mostly the stories remain unspectacular, at least on the outside. Some have failed and just don't know it yet. Some are duped and already suspect it. It is not always relationships that are scrutinized here, and most of the time the people Eva Schmidt writes about feel alone anyway, whether they are in couple relationships or not. A couple of times the author even forges a whole network of relationships with friends, partners and relatives. You really don't want to swap with anyone. And the thought of what devastation the corona pandemic is causing in this “world opposite” makes one feel very uncomfortable. In any case, Eva Schmidt not only manages in one of her stories that a completely normal question causes great unease: “What are we going to do tomorrow?”
(SERVICE – Eva Schmidt: “The world opposite”, stories, young and young, 224 pages, 22 euros)
