This is another by Stuttgart-based novelist Anna Katharina Hahn, and it's the second from my Stuttgart charity shop haul.

Published in 2009, this was her first novel. There is an English translation (Shorter Days), but I read it in German (Kuerzere Tage).

The cover is brilliant:



This white plaster corner moulding is the sort of thing you'd find gracing an upper-class ceiling in a quite refined house. But hairline cracks are emerging from it, and running in various directions. At some point a piece will break off completely, and the whole thing will start to crumble away.

It's this discreet fragility that intrigues Hahn, and she picks away at it, in horrified fascination, like a child with a scab. Shorter Days is a poignant reminder that a smooth exterior often hides deep turmoil.

It's Judith we meet first. She has at some point attempted a Master's on Otto Dix (I didn't know his work, but his Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber is mentioned, and it's certainly a striking piece). Sabotaged by a manipulative jerk of a boyfriend and by a disengaged supervisor, Judith's innate lack of confidence leads to unbearable anxiety problems, anti-depressants, and failure to complete her dissertation. Now married to Klaus, a nice, solid guy on whose mercies she literally flung herself, she is outwardly a devoted mother to her two boys, and finds that following the highly prescriptive educational principles of Rudolf Steiner acts as a kind of anchor in her life. She's still secretly on the anti-depressants, though. And she still has to rush out for a calming smoke from time to time. The relationship with academic Klaus seems an unequal one (and he seems to have his secrets too). So Judith, you feel, is always on the verge of losing it.

Leonie, a neighbour, is a working mother. She has a husband, Simon, plus two daughters, and a job in a bank. To Judith, Leonie is "normal". She's not fogged up with tranquillizers. "She can look at herself in the mirror, without seeing a loser staring back at her."


Stuttgart, just a few weeks ago

But Leonie, of course, has her own problems. Simon is the son of a single mother. Socially, his origins are below Leonie's, and he betrays this heritage at times, despite Leonie's training. Driven by a past he wants to escape, he is materially ambitious, and anxious to keep ticking off his status goals. He backs Leonie's decision to keep working full-time, but to her, he often comes across as unsupportive and absent. She has a permanent bad conscience with regard to her kids, and though she won't admit it to anyone else, she's relieved when it's time to settle down behind her desk at work.

When Judith's windows are lit up -- "the kind of lighting that makes you stop and stare on evening walks" -- they give Leonie the feeling that she is opening up a picture book, in which everything is as it should be.

Luise is a pensioner in Judith's building. Seen through the eyes of the younger women, she's initially just old Mrs Posselt, whose habits (and levels of cleanliness) are just a little bit disgusting. Then we hear her own account, as she recalls the war, and the loss of her first boyfriend, Eugen, at Stalingrad. She remembers seeing the destruction of Stuttgart ("Kaputtgart"), and watching it subsequently take on a very different character. Wenzel, her husband, is from the Sudeten community, and Luise feels she was never totally accepted by his family. They have been unable to have children, which she regrets. This is a heart-rending bit of the narrative. Through Luise's eyes, we see that it's increasingly difficult to manage things in daily life, including hygiene, and so she cuts corners accordingly. And one day Wenzel doesn't wake up. So now she's totally alone (and her preparation of his body for burial is a very strange, disconcerting scene).



These three interlocking vignettes would in themselves have made an interesting story, I feel. I'm not sure it was necessary to peripherally introduce Hanna (she never has a point-of-view segment of her own, but is described by the others). She's another struggling single mother, with a sick child, and we're left wondering at the end whether she is purposely making her son sick, in a kind of Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

And then we have Marco, where Hahn really goes out on a limb that I'm not sure worked. He's 14. He never knew his father. For a while, his mother, Anita, had a partner called Eino, an Estonian, who was good to Marco. But he left. Anita's current partner is Achim, who is violently abusive towards the boy.

I have no doubt that Hahn did her research, and I see why she needed a character from a completely different age group and economic milieu. But Marco is the character I found least convincing.

He is also, however, the one who apparently succeeds in changing his life. Many of the characters are trying to break free of their past: Judith, Simon, and Luise, as well as Marco. But he, after an apocalyptic scene of robbery and arson, is seen boarding a train for Berlin -- a first step en route to Estonia and Eino. We don't know how far he'll get, of course, but that's the point on which we close.

Everyone else is in suspended animation. Judith has had an unexpected encounter with her former disaster of a boyfriend; Leonie and Simon are at each other's throats; we don't know how Nazim -- the Turkish subject of Marco's aggravated robbery -- is doing; and Luise, to our knowledge, has still not informed anyone about the dead body she is harbouring.

But Marco is on the train to Berlin...



There's a fierce honesty about Hahn's work. She has no qualms about exposing the bits of her characters' lives that we do not normally put on display. She is also good at the detail of daily action. These are the repetitions and daily rituals, after all, that make up much of our lives' span. The locality is described very intensely. We can see these flats and their layout in our minds' eye. Radiating out from her characters' neighbourhood are the multiple facets of a Stuttgart that Hahn obviously knows very well.

It's amusing, I think, that there are multiple hat-tips to Stuttgart notable Eduard Moerike. Simon went to the "high school on Schillerstrasse, where people liked to boast that they had already had Moerike behind the lectern"; when Judith runs away from her rundown east Stuttgart locality to seek refuge with Klaus, she sits waiting for him with a book of Moerike's poetry on her lap (Peregrina is mentioned -- an English translation starts here); and Klaus wants another child, a girl, to be called Rike, after Moerike...

A thought-provoking book, then. It's a little too dense, in my view, and would have benefited from a certain pruning of the storylines. But it brings home powerfully that there are very few who are really doing as well as they appear to be.