Fantastic: So that the sun comes through

Helen Farxo is a painter and somewhat successful. When her pictures are stolen from an exhibition in a Dutch space museum, the woman in her mid-thirties takes it in her stride and doesn’t get upset about it. She is much more worried about her partner Lenell, who lives in the house they share in the small Greek town of Egio on the Gulf of Corinth and constantly suffers from depression. As a seismologist, he researches possible tectonic plate shifts in the Mediterranean.

In his new novel “Plasma Drops,” Joshua Groß tells the not-so-easy everyday relationship and work life of two people in their early 30s. But the reality of this wonderfully sweetly written story drifts between Paris, Greek beaches, a remote area in the permafrost area and the Palazzo, a mall in Holland occupied by anarchists and artists, always descends into the fantastic. Because Helen has special powers, she can tear up fields of clouds in the sky so that the sun can shine through, as well as freeze the rotating liquid in a slushy machine as she passes by. As a child, sitting with her father on a lonely beach, she even made boulders float and easily threw them into the sea.

Helen repeatedly drips the titular “plasma drops” into her eyes: “melt water to fix her shrinking eye sockets so that they can grow back” when she jets around the world, goes out to dinner in Paris with her gallery owner, and rides a quad bike travels to the permafrost area and sleeps on a lake with her lover or celebrates in a karaoke bar in Holland with her friend Lynn, a former chanson singer.

Meanwhile, her friend Lenell checks seismological measuring stations and communicates with his research colleagues when he’s not providing security for the local basketball team in the crowded stadium. He is plagued by the traumas of his childhood, especially the dysfunctional and toxic relationship with his alcoholic mother. Finally, Lenell and Helen meet the Woodpecker Man, a half-human creature who has the head of a bird, grows a rare species of tree on a small island in the Gulf of Corinth and zooms around in a seaplane. Lenell ends up having an affair with the woodpecker man, while Helen tries to use magic to cure his depression, at the risk of ultimately destroying her relationship with Lenell.

“Plasmadrop” tells of transitions, of the small-scale struggle to change and to face the sometimes difficult and banal, but also always fantastic demands of life. It’s about sexual desire, artistic longings, but also everyday events. This ranges from detailed descriptions of how espresso is made, scratching scratch cards, insurance issues for stolen paintings, the market value of art to bizarre floods in the Netherlands. Helen finally goes there to take part in a funeral for an artist, which takes place in a damaged environment. »Ten hovercraft took off from the Palazzo at minimal speed. The mourners were on board. The day faded into evening. It wasn’t snowing, but deep clouds rolled in the humid air over Lelystad.« Joshua Groß creates a sometimes lyrical, fantastic world through which he sends his protagonists.

The focus on the inner processes of his characters, their attempts to face the traumas of the past and to work through family or family-like bonds, run as a common thread through this novel. Thematically, Groß, born in 1989, is fully in line with the trend of millennial literature, such as that written by Sally Rooney, who is almost the same age, and whose new novel “Intermezzo” is also about coming to terms with traumatic and conflict-ridden family relationships. Great people like Rooney write about emotional and psychological feelings and the perception of the world beyond the realities of work, even if these occur at the very edge. Rather, it is about illuminating emotional depths and the question of how much empathy is used to shape social negotiation processes, which are ultimately always political.

The extraordinary thing about Groß’s prose is his light-hearted handling of fantastic elements, which he playfully incorporates into his texts without turning them into genre literature, although his protagonist ultimately has magical superpowers known as telekinesis. So if you want to know about the magic of the moon and stars, about seaplanes that fly to deserted islands, or are interested in ecological restoration in the Dutch urban wasteland, you shouldn’t miss this book.

Joshua Groß: Plasma drops. Matthes and Seitz, 263 p., born, €24