Katrin Seddig’s novel “Nadine”: A woman sees red

Everyone grieves differently. Nadine loses control. At first, Katrin Seddig’s title character, unlike her husband, reacts with an irritatingly unemotional response to the news that her adult daughter Mizzi has killed herself. Life has to go on, and anyway: you can’t make your children happy anyway. A week after the funeral, the protagonist reappears in the office where she works as a paralegal, to the pleasant surprise of her boss. Who can’t guess that Nadine’s impulse control isn’t the best.

For example, Seddig’s protagonist slaps her father, who has long been in need of care but still likes to play the role of master of the house, twice in the face, bang, just like that and without a guilty conscience. “Nadine”, Seddig’s sixth novel, tells the story of a woman who has adapted to the expectations of patriarchal society throughout her life, even to the point of self-abandonment. And who can no longer see any sense in it.

“You always spoil everything, she says in her head, because you can’t control yourself. Because you just can’t control yourself. For so many years she has done nothing but control herself. Controls himself with the food, controls himself with every word, stops himself, slows himself down – quieter, Nadine, more careful, Nadine! – makes itself as small as it can be, as light as it can be, as quiet as it can be, it’s almost transparent.”

Told in smooth prose

Keyword food: You have to be slim, especially as a woman, that’s what her father once preached to her, the somewhat chubby student. Now, after Mizzi’s suicide, the woman in her mid-fifties would rather buy new things than give up the only consolation she has left, food. Her husband Frank had driven out her desire for sex years earlier, told in a particularly oppressive retrospective.

Frank had once been Nadine’s speech therapist; that his wife, who was 18 years his junior, let her lust run free had disturbed him just as much as Nadine’s erotic past. Only Nadine’s pregnancy makes her “pure” again for him “as if washed with Persil”. Flashbacks like this, starting with a year as a point of orientation, alternate with the events after Mizzi’s suicide, making Nadine’s life a puzzle that is completed piece by piece.

Most recently, Katrin Seddig impressed with “Sicherheitszone”: In this novel, the Hamburg author, born in 1969, took stock of the present from multiple perspectives using the example of an ordinary or, better, usually broken family; with an urban state of emergency, the G20 summit in Hamburg, as a catalyst. “Nadine”, told in a smooth prose, on the other hand, remains completely focused on the title character. But at its core it is also about the history of a family, from the 1960s to the present day.

A family in which women take their own lives in rows: first Nadine’s paternal grandmother, then her alcoholic mother, who left in the early 1970s to pursue her dream of a career as a singer – for Nadine, who was ten at the time this abandonment became the source of a lifelong upset and anger.

And now Nadine’s daughter Mizzi, a highly talented girl who didn’t want to and couldn’t follow any rules, also because Nadine let her get away with everything from an early age in order to do things differently from her own father, who, in his helplessness as a single parent, encouraged her sometimes locked in a chamber for days. And from whom she, the “Trample”, had to learn how to behave, speak and control things properly. Or, if he took them with him on a hunt, his great passion, he would pull the trigger without mercy.

Equally depressing as impressive

In the present, Nadine has to push her father through his territory in a wheelchair while the old patriarch holds his gun in his arms “like a baby”. “He’s still a hunter. Has long had difficulty tying shoelaces, holding a coffee cup, or holding his urine. He can’t walk and can hardly see anything, but he can shoot if he wants to. It never occurred to anyone to tell him that he shouldn’t. None of his fellow hunters came to take the gun from him.”

How Nadine’s father shoots imaginary wild boars from his wheelchair until Nadine angrily snatches the rifle from his hands is probably the strongest scene in this equally depressing and impressive novel.