Sara Mesa – these requests are commands: help, family!

All happy families are similar, every unfortunate family is unhappy in their own way, »says Tolstois“ Anna Karenina ”. In “The Family”, the new novel by the Spanish writer Sara Mesa, the misfortune has its own character. But it is not, like Tolstoy, the social constraints that lead to misfortune. It is also not a violent, alcoholic father who terrorized the family. On the contrary, the head of the family in Sara Mesa’s novel is a follower of Gandhi’s philosophy of non -violence.

But he also determines the life of his wife and children, only in a more civilized, more subtle way. The mother supports him, and the four children, Damián, Rosa, Aquinino and Martina follow the family regime, they know nothing else. “You live in a bubble!” Says Clara, a neighbor, to Damián. On the way to the university, on the bus, they had started a conversation.

It is a bubble in which discipline and waiver. The father does not force Damián, he “asks him” to tear his secretly created comic collection and throw away because comics, as he thinks, are “far too childish for his age”. Damián explains Clara that it was “damn difficult” to oppose them. When the children were even smaller, the father constantly improved her expression. And they actually only left the apartment for school. They were never allowed to play with the neighboring children on the street. The mother says they got four children so that they could then play together and “not tempted to look for a distraction on the street”.

The first, just a little more than one page long chapter is therefore dedicated to the apartment. «Look at them through the dream eye. The hallway as a geographical center, as a border. Rooms on both sides. » It is not clear who speaks. Is it Martina who came to the family later because her parents died and she was adopted by her uncle and her aunt? Or Damián, the oldest? The most plausible seems to be an anonymous narrator who knows about everything on the one hand and, on the other hand, looks at family members from a certain distance. Again and again he speaks of “us”, as if one of the four children were to tell.

Perhaps it is what the reader pulls into the text so quickly: this “we”, the familiar family tone, tells Sara Mesa. He creates an atmosphere that everyone knows from their own childhood. Which is also about the contradictions between your own childish privacy, the family and their relationship to the outside world. Only that Sara Mesa’s family is an extreme case.

An example of this is told at the very beginning when Martina was just accepted in the family. Because she found the book cover so beautiful, she had bought a notebook with a small castle. The father suspects that she wants to write a diary. No, it is just a notebook, says Martina when he asks her. But at the living room table, where the family always gathers to learn or work something else where everyone can see everyone over their shoulders, the father asks them to write in it. The father who has power does not prohibit. He asks Martina to write in order to perhaps learn something about her interior. The power is productive here – according to Michel Foucault. Writing as a means of control.

But how should it be otherwise, despite all foreclosure, life always penetrates the family. For example, there is the uncle who is so different from the parents. A fun -loving man who smokes and drinks, who is uneducated and the children spacious with things that are actually prohibited during his visit. He likes to provoke what leads to argument and thus questions the family regime. Even if Sara Mesa later tells of the episodes that the adult children drag around with her because of her family past, “the family” is an educational novel in this regard that deals with emancipation from the confines of origin.

Sara Mesa is not a great language artist, but she has a good sense of the narrative timing and psychology of her characters. She never loses sympathy for her unfortunate protagonists. This applies even to the father, in which the reader does not find out why he has so rigid claims to the family, whose misfortune also becomes clear in the end. And so in “the family” everyone is unhappy in their own way.

Sara Mesa: The family. A. d. Span. v. Peter Kulten. Wagenbach, 240 pages, born, 24 €.