Stella’s days have acquired a pattern: preparing her daughter, Ava, for kindergarten then mechanically attending to as many chores as possible before setting off for her part-time job as a home carer for elderly and infirm patients.
Stella’s days are monotonous. It is as if she has a small role, moving around on the little stage which her home has become. Entire glimpses of her life may be viewed though windows. She cleans and folds many items of clothing, mostly her daughter’s, washes plates and then gets ready for the next act. Preparing little meals for her patients is similar to what she does for her child. Only, with the child, Stella is in complete control, just about.
At the kindergarten, she is grateful for the days when Ava isn’t the last child to be picked up. On one such evening: “There are six or seven other kids there; their jackets still hanging on the clothes’ hooks; little pictures of tractors, flowers and butterflies are pasted next to the hooks. A snail is pasted next to Ava’s hook, which she has been and continues to be distressed about since her first day in kindergarten.”
Stella suspects her child is a loner; it is a strange observation – after all, she is only four “going on five”. She also thinks Ava may be as impatient as she, Stella, is.
But then, Stella is uneasy. She has already had to deal with the teachers asking her if she “reaffirms Ava sufficiently”. An odd inquiry – and an intrusive one. It upset Stella, who “had a hard time understanding the question”. Stella fears she reaffirms her too much. It seems she gets attacked on all sides, including by her patients, particularly grumpy Esther, who orders her to stop frowning: “You’ll look like an angry parrot when you get old.”
It takes very little to detect the numbing misery of Stella's life in a modern, not-yet- complete housing estate, where none of the neighbours are sufficiently interested to speak to each other. Berliner Judith Hermann has demonstrated her grasp of modern isolation since the publication of her first collection, Sommerhaus, Später, in 1998. Those nine stories, which appeared in English within three years, explored a generation coming of age in and around Berlin.
Unlike her great, near-contemporary Jenny Erpenbeck, who makes inspired use of the past, Hermann is rooted in a taut, rather bloodless present. Her characters are trapped in freefall, described with precise prose, conveying detail if little emotion, probably because emotion is confined to a mounting hysteria for which there are no words.
Where Love Begins is a flatly written, chilling study of how life can become confined within a framework that is both protective and restricted. The narrative has a stilted, improvisational quality. Stella is barely alive. After leaving her daughter to playschool, she cycles home, "unlocks the front door, enters the hall and feels distinctly grateful, as if everything around her were temporary, as if there were no certainty of permanence".
Stella is married to Jason, the quiet man into whose hand she once placed her own when she found herself seated next to him on a small plane. Returning from the wedding of her friend Clara, she confessed her fear of flying to Jason and asked if she could sit beside him. Aside from holding her hand, Jason simply fell asleep. Stella asked if they would see each other again. It took Jason three weeks, but he did phone her.
That three-week delay acquires prophetic resonance. Jason works away from home, and he and Stella appear to share a remote relationship.
Likewise, everything about this novel is conducted at a remove. Hermann has separated Stella from Clara, “her best and only friend”, by a distance of 1,000km: “she has two children now and is just as addicted to being alone as Stella. That’s because of the children, Clara says. They devour you. Stella thinks of that in the mornings when she sits at the kitchen table with Ava, drinking tea with honey and watching her eat a banana.” Stella recalls telling Ava that “Clara says you devour us. Is that true, Ava?” Not quite what one might put to a child “going on five”.
Somehow Stella gets through the days, thanks to unusual support from Paloma who runs the office at the community centre. The use of the word “community” may be intended as ironic as there is no humour in the book and no sign of community either. Paloma is the most interesting character. She is 50, “tall and gaunt; her expression is disdainful and at the same time melancholy . . . she babysits for Ava; she’s curious but not too curious . . . Paloma has a penchant for Swedish crime novels. She almost always wears black dresses . . . she looks like an actress in a silent film . . .” Wilfully vague It is curious. Hermann has placed a number of noncommittal characters hovering around her dull central character. Stella apparently was wilder in her previous life. But none of this really adds much to a story which is deliberately, wilfully vague. Jason returns home for brief stays. The only development of much interest is the arrival of a man who rings at Stella’s door and speaks to her though the intercom. He is intent on a conversation. These visitations inflicted by Mister – not Herr – Pfister settle into a routine: “The ringing of someone who just wants to say, Here I am, I’m here, standing outside your door.”
The narrative progresses into a bland void. There is no real menace, only the banal persistence of a stranger determined to engage. Where Love Begins is slow-moving and humdrum. Instead of mounting terror, there is only an irritating relentlessness and Hermann ponders about where to take the story. Even the possibility that the intruder may be a rejected or traumatised suitor simply evaporates. Stella decides to return the favour and sets out to his door. His mailbox is old and dirty: " . . . the mailbox is brimful. Advertisements, direct mail, window envelopes. Stella takes out a letter, an official letter from a bank, and stuffs it back into the mailbox . . ." She imagines what the side of his house is like: "a bizarre, glowing, toxic wave of chaos" sloshing "over the doorsill out into the garden, flowing towards Stella, and Stella lets the cover of the mailbox drop and backs away."
Eventually she spots her stalker in the local supermarket but he is only interested in her when she is at home, or rather, his abiding fascination may be with her house. The one-dimensional stalker lives to a set of rules. Hermann makes several thrusts at injecting some atmosphere, yet even a half- hearted display of violence does nothing to dispel the aura of polemical sleepwalking. If Where Love Begins is a metaphor for social isolation it is vague, directionless and lacking any conviction. As if as an after thought, a closing paragraph attempts to put Stella's crisis in perspective, but it is far too hasty and random to salvage a mundane story that never really goes anywhere nor takes even a minor risk in the process. Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent
