Donata Rigg
- Low Sundays
- Weiße Sonntage
- Mairisch 2010
“‘Compromises are shit…You both lose something, you both gain something, and in the end nobody really has what they wanted.’” Uncompromising would be a good word for Donata Rigg’s debut novel Low Sundays (Weiße Sonntage). It’s a strenuous read, but oh-so worth the work.
Maria’s twin sister Martha has killed herself, and we follow Maria and her boyfriend Albert as they return to the sisters’ hometown to try to come to terms with the loss. The novel actually takes place in a very short time span, but the majority of its action follows Maria’s memories as they rove back over her adolescence and girlhood. Her sisterhood.
Through Maria, we get to know Martha, who is really the central character in the novel though she’s dead before it begins. Martha is insane, Martha is perhaps even insanity itself, and she lives on in Maria’s head, wheedling, violent, warm, repulsive, seductive. Maria, the reflective one, the intelligent one, the not-or-at-least-less-crazy one, the bitter one, the one who has to pick up the pieces.
Low Sundays is a difficult book for three reasons. One, on an emotional level, it’s fatiguing and acerbic. Maria and Albert are not your run-of-the-mill identifiable protagonists, and let’s not even talk about Martha.
Second, the time-structure is atypical; the story takes a sort of reverse-chronological loop, beginning after Martha’s death as Maria and Albert’s relationship disintegrates over dinner in a restaurant, moving back through Maria’s memories, occasionally surfacing in the present for some Albert-dialogue, and ending up back at the restaurant for a shocking scatological incident before dissolving in Maria’s revery on the curb outside.
Third, on a finer compositional level, logic is not in the drivers’ seat (which is logical, in that it’s a book about insanity). An element of surprise is always present; paragraphs break radically in the middle. All three (two and a half?) characters think the incomprehensible and say the inexplicable (or at least the not-bothered-to-be-explained).
Sentences follow on each other bound by tenuous, gossamer connections that disappear when you stare at them head-on; the statements remain by virtue of their own insistence and honesty. Describing a golden summer the two girls spent together, Maria says, “The simultaneity of things — when the greater rhythm is stronger than the character of the individual instruments — is a superior form of happiness. Evenings, we brought our no-longer-hungover mother flowers we’d picked during the day. I didn’t read. I didn’t wait. I got into bed and fell asleep.” Beautiful no? But it demands much of you. You must follow Maria’s thought along the fault where her intelligence leaves off and the insanity begins.
That fault is never clearly demarcated. Though the book is ostensibly about Maria getting over Martha’s loss, about separation, as Maria recounts her relationship with Martha, she incorporates Martha into her own character. Martha’s repeated dialogue becomes Maria’s own words. Martha’s experience, as told by Maria, belongs to Maria: “My premature spiritual experience, the blackout during the service, couldn’t touch the complete tandem we formed throughout the seventh grade: I let myself dissolve around Martha and surrounded her like an aura in whose light she clearly and elegantly revealed herself.”
By calling Rigg’s book difficult, I don’t mean to limit its appeal. Its challenges are purposeful and interesting, and you get out what you put in. There were times when Rigg’s clear, clipped, astounding sentences reminded me of Lydia Davis. Or when her shrewd, twisted imaginings made me think of Deborah Eisenberg. It’s no coincidence that both are female writers known mainly for their short stories. Insane dead woman haunts intelligent neurotic sister clearly describes a plot that takes on large issues in women’s history. Sisterhood is powerful, right?
As for the short story part, there’s something complete, compact, and polished about Low Sundays that I often associate with short fiction. For all the insanity it contains, it wraps itself up. And I’m not the only one who thinks so; WELT raved* about Rigg and her brilliant debut.
*I find the article indicative of a prevalent attitude in Germany that undervalues independent publishers — ‘What? You mean a brilliant writer was published by a small publisher? What a shame that our proper presses didn’t have the sense to pick it up.’ More on this in a later post.
This text by Amanda DeMarco is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
