“For years I was only good at things that interested me, and since I was really only interested in my books and my children, the rest had gradually crept away.” This is how the narrator of the short story “The Midnight Zone” puts it. This brash sentence can also be seen as the program of “Florida”, Lauren Groff’s new collection of short stories, which was nominated for a 2018 National Book Award. Eleven stories that explore what that means today: being a woman, an intellectual and a mother, what limitations there are and what emancipation might look like.
Discomfort that is regarding to revolt
“Florida” is therefore far from being devotional literature – on the contrary. The stories, brilliantly translated into German by Stefanie Jacobs, portray mothers and their children as fundamentally endangered. Endangered by outdated traditions, but also by their own claims. “Most of the time, I only get a glimpse of the moms I know as they crookedly scour the ground for tiny Lego bricks, half-chewed grapes, or the people they used to be, slumped in a corner.”
This is the laconic tone in which Groff’s heroines inspect their own destiny. They react to the socially prescribed role models with uneasiness that is on the verge of escalating into revolt. The gesture of this prose is corresponding: it is exciting in the sense of tense, a narrative tone that masterfully evokes the atmosphere of imminent danger.
escape from fear
The first and last story denies the same narrator. “Somehow I turned into a woman who screams around,” it says at the beginning of “Ghosts and Vacancies”. And at the end of the volume, this woman and her two sons are accompanied from Florida to France, to the little town of Yport.
“You lousy mutt fear would certainly not come up with the idea of looking for her here,” explains the narrator, but the calculation doesn’t add up. The research project on Guy de Maupassant (like Groff, a brilliant story writer) loses itself in aversions to the poet (“morally obnoxious”, “drenched in male white arrogance”); In the end, neither a change of location nor a change of language bring regarding the hoped-for release from a relationship that has become dull.
A rigorous introspection
Nine excellent pieces of prose are inserted between these two stories, they fan out the topic of emancipation in the most varied of ways: in “Oben und Unten” a doctoral student drifts into homelessness following several blows of fate, but is able to hold her own on the street better than expected.
In “Eye to Eye,” a woman stays in her home despite all warnings, even as a hurricane “bruises like bruises” and the neighbor, a macho Land Rover, is urging evacuation. In the story “Blumenjäger” a Halloween night becomes the occasion for a rigorous introspection: “What is it regarding me that everyone always needs a break?” asks the narrator. The fact that Lauren Groff’s prose refuses to give a simple answer makes her book excellent reading material.
Lauren Groff: “Florida”. stories
Translated from the English by Stefanie Jacobs
Hanser Berlin, Berlin 2019
320 pages, 22 euros
