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Gregor Hens
Matta verlässt seine Kinder
(Matta’s Way)
S. Fischer Verlag, February 2004. 141 pp. Matta is sitting in the Pakistani consulate, getting hotter and hotter and more and more overwrought as he waits in the stifling room for his papers to be dealt with. Sticky heat, ticking clocks, memories of conflict zones – all these impressions crowd into his mind until, suddenly, he breaks. He screams at the consulate staff, throws away the forms, storms out of the building and rushes back home – to resign his job as a post-conflict analyst and walk out for ever on his wife and two young children. His decision to leave is radical, dramatic and tinged with insanity. This is a novel about destruction in which the terrible fallout from international conflict is repeated on a smaller scale in individual characters’ lives. The storytelling is correspondingly urgent. Soon we learn of Rebecca, Matta’s beautiful wife, and their ‘open’ relationship which he can no longer bear. Instead, he crosses Germany to meet his Swedish girlfriend, Malin, an art historian, whom he had met three years ago on a family holiday. She alone, he believes, will understand his predicament, offer him refuge from the horrors of his job and enable him to escape from a vicious world in which men, women and children are victims and persecutors alike, all trapped in a hell of their own making. Yet this arrangement is programmed to repeat the disastrous pattern of its predecessor. Malin believes that Matta has a faulty image both of her and of their partnership. She feels constrained and disregarded. Matta, having abandoned his triangular relationship, is shocked to find her unwilling to commit. Both are mentally and spiritually homeless, vainly attempting to plug their feelings of loss by a possessiveness that can only destroy them both.
This novel plunges the reader into a maelstrom of
emotions and insights, images and stories. There are, as
the author indicates, lots of ways of leaving or abandoning
people – but the consequences are inescapable.
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