Golden Prison – polyphonic novel by Annette Bennett “The Dirty Woman”: Literaturkritik.de

The Dirty Woman by Annette Bennett

Written by Peter Mohr

Book review/references

“I always wanted to write,” he says, smiling at me as he puts the book and stack of papers on my desk. This is how the anonymous first-person narrator describes Annette Bennett’s new novel Dirty woman A key scene in the plot.

The protagonist, a mother of two grown children, wanted to write her own apartment, almost a quiet haven to let her creativity run free. An unassuming, semi-modest woman, married to a completely unsympathetic man, named none other than “Minman” and floundering through the plot like a domineering patriarch with a smiley face. The woman admitted that “I was afraid of the good looks he gave me when I went wrong.”

55-year-old Annette Bent, who has been professor of creative writing and cultural journalism at the University of Hildesheim since 2018, delivers a fascinating, complex script with contrasting characters in which almost every certainty changes or even turns into the opposite.

Couples are controlling and passive, confident and introverted. Your writing apartment is becoming more and more a prison. There is a lot of suffering in the luxury of financial independence. The protagonist is a bit old, a very private artist who lives in self-isolation without a laptop, internet or phone. Her husband has organized and prepared everything and even goes shopping for her and decides who comes to visit her. He introduces his wife as an exhibit. Peace hoped for in solitude quickly turns into almost incomprehensible inner turmoil. The desired freedom (here for creative expression) turns into complete dependence, because the heroine no longer leaves her apartment. At first, a woman of “artistic inclinations” certainly appreciated her high-rise sanctuary, always with a subtle and irreverent demeanor: “My husband is no guard and I am no prisoner.”

This tight novel by Annette Bent also has a lot to offer formally. There are no periods at the end of sentences, instead, interstitial commas that give the text a state of open, vague limbo. The stories written by the hero in the “writing room” are incorporated into the text in italics. Here, too, Annette Bent deliberately worked with opposites. The main character’s texts, told in a traditional, conservative manner, are once bold, solemnly floating and then interwoven, as there is also a “dirty little” woman who does not clean up even after extensive washing. The heroine also felt dirty (meaning not quite clean) by her dominant husband.

The end of the novel, which conveys a gradual change in the hero’s consciousness, reads: “While I thought him tall, at present he seems rather small to me.” After the water damage, she left her apartment (her golden prison) and wandered the secluded alleys: “I can feel how slowly I walk here and smile, how my face opens around the lips and in the corners of my eyes, how the skin spasms and tightens.”

In the end you feel that this novel is not just written, but composed. Polyphonic Tones – With delicate violin notes and powerful trumpet sounds. Alienation, isolation, the failure of self-realization, the double-edged sword of happiness and the difficulties of the writing process – Annette Bennett handles all of this with a light hand. And Dirty woman It is also a book about a hidden longing – for love and appreciation.