Jeza Jessen: “A Loud Song” – a declaration of love made later

“Sometimes we walked the whole Bundesallee to my place in Schöneberg, and then it was already night, first the sweet smell of chestnuts and later in the year the linden trees, the flowers blooming in the dark like porcelain. Every time I thought I too could go on living without you, and then An evening like this comes and I want to rush against it, again and again, like a mad woman, like a really mad woman who can’t see that you won’t find what you’re looking for in me any more.”

The relationship is over and the book begins. The nameless philosophy student and narrator named Gisa Jessen have been a couple for four or five years, walking for hours in Berlin and discussing everything under the sun, kissing in university halls and buying antique bookshops in the capital. What do you do as a student and a young man. But just because everyone does it doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean less to the individual. And Gesa means that, as long as it lasts and beyond the world.

“I find you so beautiful, it strikes me again and again, such happiness by looking at your face. As if there were something inexpressible, untranslatable, something in the arch of your eyebrows, the curvature of your nose and the shape of your mouth. Such a sign. Something I must constantly answer to.” “.

It is above all a book by a writer, completely immersed in the writing, whose writing pulse continues to beat, even when her loving heart threatens to fail.

“I know I still have to separate the newspaper in the trash from the used coffee cups and clean my shoes in the closet—all these things belong to me, so to speak, waiting longingly to take care of them again, but I sit there and I can’t. I can’t hold my body and do these things.” Movements, the only thing I can do now is write them down.”

Lovesickness, isn’t that a slightly silly and somewhat worn-out theme for the book? Not if you take it so seriously, so relentlessly, with such a wonderful sense of form and rhythm as Gesa Jessen. “The Loud Song” is not a quiet song. The author sings every word in this book loud and clear.