View of the megalopolis Tehran in good light
Photo: dpa
Her last book was already a travel book, and in the “School of India Travelers” published in 2017, real and mental journeys were interwoven into a poetic network, a prose that does not captivate you with its story, but rather through a very peculiar linguistic pull Images and associations. If the subtitle of the new book by the language artist Friederike Kretzen is called “A Novel of a Journey,” then that is somewhat misleading: here, the narrator self of an author who travels to Tehran and appears at the Swiss embassy speaks unmasked about her planned Persian Book talks, visits museums and meets artists. But it is also not a travel journal, because even if the chronology from the arrival in Tehran to the onward journey to Isfahan is preserved, the temporal jumps and digressions are numerous, and the language often moves far away from the protocol of ongoing events .
This traveler is a privileged visitor from the West, and although she attends embassy receptions and universities, she is not a typical cultural jet-setter. During her time as a student in Giessen, the narrator met young Persians who suddenly disappeared after the revolution; and she was in Iran for the first time 40 years before the new trip, on the way to India with a group of friends. Now she is drawn there again and turns to the Swiss ambassador: “I write to him, all the sunken areas within us, with their stars and little moons, the way they sometimes appear to us at night, in dreams, or shortly before we wake up . They have to be somewhere?” She suddenly became aware of the relativity of the geographical location when she learned in Mumbai that the Indian Ocean there is called the Arabian Sea: “Immediately the room turns, turns upside down. I get caught in a vortex and am thrown around. And with me the geography of my inner view. Has everything I ever experienced been upside down?”
It is difficult to read “Picture of the Picture of the Big Moon” today without thinking of the events in Iran after Mahsa Amini’s death in September 2022, which can no longer play a role in the book. Kretzen avoids concrete discussions of the political situation and does not reproduce any political discussions. And yet there seems to be something in the air: “Every day again. Waiting for something to stop, for the curtain to open. Isn’t that what they all tell me every day?” The narrator, meanwhile, moves through the megalopolis with her eyes open and describes places where time seems to have stood still, decaying modernist buildings from the time of the Shah. She interprets the fact that a theater opened in 1973 with, of all things, Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard” as an “anticipation of the downfall”: “What else could they have played back then? Game of the end and endgame. Sleep, die. The comedies continue.”
Once, during an architectural tour, there was a commotion in front of a mosque and the question arises: “Has the revolution broken out? Fighting, unleashing?” No, the revolution has not yet broken out, and there is no explanation for the incident. The regime is present in everyday life and has a direct impact on everyone’s life. Should an artist who studied in the West marry her French boyfriend and leave the country for good?
Some take refuge in sarcasm: “They say they’re waiting, they say we’re not going, they’re waiting. Say, when there are a hundred of us, all women will be free.” It seems clear that things cannot continue like this forever. But how long? »Something will happen, says Maryam, we will awaken. Us or future generations. Nothing our parents and grandparents fought for is done.”
Friederike Kretzen’s “Novel of a Journey” begins with a question: “Have I seen Persia or a film by Kiarostami?” The narrator is aware of the fact that she perceives the world not least through the lens of her readings and aesthetic experiences and is reflected in this prose . And the title “Picture of a Picture” is not just a picture. When the narrator is asked about her Persia book at a university event, she quotes Michel Foucault, who was enthusiastic about the Iranian revolution in 1979, traveled to Tehran and wrote about “political spirituality”: “That is his dream of the many Orients, theirs inaccessibility and the subjects who rebel against the rationality of any universality. That’s what I’m looking for in my book.” Then a man from the audience speaks up and objects: “Isn’t this simply an escape from the meaninglessness of the West? (…) We suffer, try to endure, stay, but don’t want to be here as we are. We just don’t want to go to the West. Americans go home. The West is the void.«
Friederike Kretzen: Picture of the picture of the big moon. Novel of a journey. Dörlemann, 288 pages, hardcover, €25.
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