Review – Julie Zee’s New Year’s Novel – Culture

No matter how hard a person pushes himself, he cannot escape from himself. Henning is tortured on New Year’s Day in Lanzarote. He pedals his bike until his muscles fail, shivering and convulsing. Henning loves cycling, and cycling relaxes him, he tells himself. Most importantly, it takes him a few hours away from his obligations. From his family, to be exact. Henning is a modern dad — and constantly stressed.

His wife, Teresa, he and his wife share the family business, and they both work, and she is more successful than him, which is why he does some housework, “which Teresa also expects, she knows.” They both take care of two children, Bebe and Jonas, two and four. However, youngsters run to her more often than when they are hurt, sick, or tired; Then Henning’s wife said, “You have a father, and he has hands and feet, so why don’t you ask him?” Henning struggles but fails time and time again. He is ready to be a liberated man: “He wants it, he believes in it.”

Julie Zee’s new novel “New Year” is about a character still unfamiliar in literature, the overburdened father. We already know from the great novels of the nineteenth century a drowning lover, a drowning artist, an overcrowded city dweller. They all fail because of the circumstances, the environment around them, or because of the women. But Henning, the protagonist of Julie Zhe’s story, a middle-aged white man with a wife and two children, is not among them. Historically, Henning is another step forward: he is in no way averse to the dismantling of old cliched roles and the loss of his privileges. He not only accepts change, but leads and lives it in an exemplary way. But that’s what makes him such a tragic character.

“Anger is like an energy field, like heat or light. Henning is burning inside.”

The phenomenon that Julie Zeh is talking about is unpopular. Excessive demands are often dismissed as a problem for the socially marginalized. The novel shows a liberated society what it would not like to see: even those who are in the vanguard of liberation can overwhelm themselves when they try to live several lives at the same time. An identity crisis, provoked by the loss of old certainties, made Julie Zeh internalize literary jargon by placing Henning in a narrative construct like a hamster on a wheel. The plot of “New Year’s” breaks right in the middle: the first narrates the segment – in strict accordance with the Aristotelian unity of time, space and external action – from Henning’s bike ride to Canary Mountain Road. Henning sweats and suffers. He feels sorry for himself up to the top of the Atalaya volcano.

Henning begins to chant silently to the rhythm of kicks: dirty wind, dirty wind, dirty wind. Anger gives him strength. Kicking seems to be a little easier. It is general anger. Not only in the street, wind and mountain. It is anger of everything, anger like a field Energy, like heat or light. Henning burns on the inside. A trivial, trivial job, a trivial world.” And then it explodes: Damn Teresa, Jonas’s petty, Baby’s petty, children’s petty, and family petty. “He doesn’t even think about it anymore, he just screams. He has no idea what he means by that. There’s no one in the world who loves him that much.”

Henning is a modern man. Yet he envies men who don’t sit on their bikes that morning but sleep drunk with, “Men who have no kids. Or run it better than he does.” He doubts whether in-laws are right when they question this contemporary family model. Because they certainly didn’t “crawl across the house on their knees looking for a lollipop or their current favorite stuffed animal”. But Henning crawls and erodes. So much so that at one point IT attacked him like a disease. a. s. These panic attacks struck him first at night, and then also during the day, robbing him of the last strength that would allow him to walk the “narrow path between work and family.” Panic, suspicion, hate – it all rises as Henning struggles up the mountain. The simplicity of the plot, Henning riding a bicycle for 90 pages, allows the struggles to flow from this hero. Problems that appear only after equality has been achieved, after it has become a new “so it should be”.

Right in the middle of the novel, Henning has reached the top. But he finds no relief there. What follows is visualizing the narrative as a free fall into one’s past, a childhood memory of an experience that made Henning the person he is today. “New Year” tells about the slavery that is meant by origin and identity; But also from those that you create yourself. And the abyss that opens when one gets rid of this lack of freedom.

Panic attacks are a symptom of being overwhelmed by self-imposed demands

As in previous books, Julie Z’s literary process, which excites her fans as much as it annoys her critics, consists of an empirical arrangement, although the outcome of the experiment is not really open-ended. His costume uses each novel to illustrate something that often smokes unspoken in society: the dynamics of coexistence and the human psyche.