Björn recenserade Stalinhusen av Ricarda Junge
None
3 stjärnor
There's a standard plot for single-parent ghost stories: Single woman (almost never a man) with small child moves into new flat, tries to balance parenthood, supporting herself and her child, and society's mixed views of single parenthood. The more it all gets to her, the more she starts to notice that something is Wrong in the flat. That's The Exorcist, that's Dark Water, that's (the mostly excellent 2014 film) The Babadook... To some extent it's The Turn Of The Screw as well.
Junge makes the clever move of having the young mother be a West German moved to the former East Berlin, about 10 years after the reunification, adding another ghost layer; an entire country, an entire set of rules and social mores and memories that have officially ceased to exist. There's an invisible country just underneath the one she sees, and her neighbours have all known …
There's a standard plot for single-parent ghost stories: Single woman (almost never a man) with small child moves into new flat, tries to balance parenthood, supporting herself and her child, and society's mixed views of single parenthood. The more it all gets to her, the more she starts to notice that something is Wrong in the flat. That's The Exorcist, that's Dark Water, that's (the mostly excellent 2014 film) The Babadook... To some extent it's The Turn Of The Screw as well.
Junge makes the clever move of having the young mother be a West German moved to the former East Berlin, about 10 years after the reunification, adding another ghost layer; an entire country, an entire set of rules and social mores and memories that have officially ceased to exist. There's an invisible country just underneath the one she sees, and her neighbours have all known each other for a long time, so who does she turn to when her 2-year-old son starts talking about seeing a strange woman in their flat...? Is there an actual ghost, or is she the young reunited German just slowly losing track of where she is and whether she shares the same Germany as her parents and her neighbours...?
Sadly, the novel never quite lives up to what the setup promises. Junge never raises the stakes enough to make it a good ghost story - especially with the rather lame ending - and her protagonist/narrator never quite digs deeply enough into the world she finds herself in to be much more than a passive observer. It's still a great setup, and it delivers for a while, but putters out to a weak ***.