One thinks that one has read this sentence somewhere else, in books by Annie Ernaux or Didier Eribon, possibly also in “A Man in His Class”, the debut of the German writer Christian Baron: “To climb up means to betray one’s own class and to lose it risking the soul”.
But the sentence is in the US author Sigrid Nunez, in her first novel, which has only just been translated into German, “A Feather on the Breath of God”, which was published in 1995 and which can hardly be called a novel because it is clearly a Memoir, an autobiographical narrative can be recognized.
In it, Nunez tells in four parts about her father, her mother, her time as a ballet student when she was 11 or 12 years old, and about a lover, Vadim, with whom she then had a lengthy affair in her twenties.
Surprisingly, she is so analytical and only reflects on her own social class at the very end, precisely in connection with Vadim, a Russian from the then Soviet Odessa, to whom she feels drawn while teaching English for migrants in New York.
Vadim is a lot older, “thirty-seven years old and already a grandfather, a not unusual Russian story”. Above all, he is a man of her lower class and shares an immigrant background with her.
He makes ends meet in New York as a taxi driver and before that he was a pimp, drug dealer and other big and petty criminal in Odessa: “A very bad person. A brute. A pimp. A threat to women.”
Sigrid Nunez does not introduce Vadim to her friends, although they are eager to look at his photos and hear everything about him. It never occurred to her, she writes, also because she believes that her friends could hardly have endured an encounter. Maybe it was shame, maybe she didn’t want to be fixed on her origins again: “You can get the girl out of social housing, but…”
Nunez is long on her way to escaping her class, only to later be able to say, “The sound of a pen drawn across paper in the night is a sacred sound.” She gets her Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, earns money from language teaching jobs and meets Susan Sontag, whose assistant she becomes.
Nunez also lives with Sontag, she described it as “intellectually assisted living” in her memoirs of her time with Sontag, and she has a love affair with her son David Rieff.
When “A Feather on the Breath of God” appears, Sigrid Nunez is already 44 years old. A late debutante, who came to greater literary honors with some delay and thus also became known outside of the USA: In 2018, Nunez received the National Book Award for her novel “The Friend”.
The Friend is a truly stunning novel about grieving after the death of a friend. This grief processing goes hand in hand with the intimate relationship with a dog, a huge Great Dane. The US award led to renewed interest in Nunez’ books in Germany, among other places.
With “In Liebe, Lyle”, the Virginia Woolf novel “Das Krallenäffchen” and the Vietnam novel “Für Rouenna”, several of Nunez’s novels were published in German in the late 1990s and early 2000s, without a larger one being published response to it (possibly misguided reception, the wrong subject, similar to Ernaux).
That all changed with “Der Freund”, especially since Sigrid Nunez’s preferred form of autofictional writing has now almost become fashionable. After the Susan Sontag memoir and the new, again very personal novel “What you are missing”, which, among other things, deals with terminal care, Aufbau Verlag is now publishing the autobiographical debut of the New York writer.
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In it, Nunez gets to the bottom of her childhood and youth and tells how she became what she is in her mid-forties. Her first and last name alone indicate her multi-ethnic origins. The mother is German and came to the USA at the age of 18 after the Second World War; the father was born in Colón, Panama in 1911 to a Central American mother and a Chinese from Shanghai and spent the first ten years of his life in China.
He was then sent back to Colón by his father, where, as a Panamanian citizen, he hispanized his name, from Chang to Nunez.
His daughter first talks about his life, about which she basically knows very little, not least because Carlos Chang Nunez has always kept quiet, in keeping with the cliché. He doesn’t speak English, and when he emigrates to the States and stays in New York, he learns it more badly than well.
Carlos mainly works in restaurants before he joins the US Army in World War II and fights in France and Germany. In southern Germany, where his father was still stationed for some time after the end of the war, he finally met the young Christa, Sigrid Nunez’s mother, and got her pregnant. He’s more than twice her age.
The relationship remains a mystery to Sigrid Nunez (and not only to her, but also to the reader) from the very beginning. Alone the linguistic understanding is a difficult one. This and the refusal to learn English certainly favored the later silence of the father. Language itself and the communicative (non-) togetherness run through this book as a leitmotif.
This is not only the case with the father, but also with Vadim, the Russian lover whom Nunez teaches English to proudly register his progress; and with the mother, to whom she devotes the longest, most intense chapter.
Christa Nunez is anything but satisfied with her life in the USA, in the changing social housing on Staten Island and in Brooklyn. She speaks good English, but you can hear her German origins and some idiomatic mix-ups. Even if she starts to think in English late in life, Germany has her full attention and she feels out of place: “She was different. She didn’t belong.”
The mother suffers from homesickness, visits the Federal Republic several times, has a complicated relationship with a Mr. Blum, a suspected Holocaust survivor, and glorifies the past, which prevents her from returning because everything has changed in post-war Germany too.
Sometimes the impression arises that Sigrid Nunez wrote her book solely to settle accounts with her mother, because of a lack of maternal love (she was to be aborted first). But again and again she reveals a certain closeness to her and varies Freud’s saying that the worst thing in a man’s life is the death of his father: “Oh mother”.
The mother chapter seems to unravel in sentences, in a self-assured faltering. But in “A Feather on the Breath of God” (by the way a quote from Hildegard von Bingen), you can already clearly see today’s experienced writer with her clever and thoughtful, her clear and sober narrative style, not shy of any literary references.
Even the short ballet chapter stands out here, in which Nunez turns to her own teenage self, beyond mother, father and Vadim. She thinks along with the ballet and describes it as a system, in the same way that it is largely dominated by men at management levels, just as girls are actually drilled into boys or sexless beings here.
And in general the phallic aspect of a pointe shoe! She is certainly not the first to make this connection, says Nunez, “between the pointe shoe and an erection”.
With ballet, Nunez is about discipline, about pain, about feeling your own body, about a language that gets by without words. Of course, it is also a step away from the conditions at home, but that only works halfway. She is immediately confronted with her origins again when visiting a fellow ballerina from the upper class, for whom “there was no doubt as to her future.”
Sigrid Nunez has not lost her soul, and she should have overcome her doubts about her own writing right away with this first book, so much does it refer to her confidently accomplished novels “The Friend” and “What You Miss”. “A Feather on the Breath of God” reads so contemporary, as if Nunez hadn’t written it almost thirty years ago, but just now.