The premise seems familiar from the abundance of police thrillers on our screens: A man comes in to find his wife sitting at his desk, looking beautiful, but as he moves closer we all realise that the figure at the desk is in fact dead. Here the similarities with all those TV dramas end. Instead of collapsing with grief or calling some sort of official, the husband finds himself reading the last words she was writing. Words of recrimination, words condemning him. Notes in the margin of an old manuscript from the beginning of a novel of his. The husband is compelled to read and he cannot ignore it or answer back:
„Es half nichts, er mußte lesen. Gut, er hätte vielleicht erst einmal die
Kinder benachrichtigen sollen. Doch kam
es auf ein paar Minuten jetzt noch an?
Gut, er hätte einen Arzt holen müssen, damit der den Totenschein
ausstellte. (...) Und dann wäre ja
wirklich alles vorbeit gewesen (.)“
/ “It
didn’t help, he had to read.
Yes, perhaps he should have called the children first. But were a few minutes going to make a
difference now? Yes, he should have
fetched a doctor to write the death certificate. (…) But then everything would truly be over (.)” (my translation)
It
is a dark novella, full of Kleistian questions of the ability to communicate
truly with another human being. The
couple both studied Ancient Chinese philosophy and so there are also questions
about the afterlife and belief. Images
of an eternal lake we all have to cross once we go are used by the late
wife. Unfortunately one of the
weaknesses of the English title is that it just cannot capture the beauty of
the German word “Jenseits”, meaning the far side, the beyond.
It
is a novella concerned with death as the end of a relationship. The husband can no longer communicate, and
feels his early novel has been misunderstood as relating to his own
promiscuity. He cannot convince his
wife Doro of this though because she took the facts in her own interpretation
and then passed away.
Not
for the faint-hearted, but necessary reading.
