‘When I Feel Hurt, I Just Smile’

An interview with Arnon Grunberg by Toef Jaeger

(NRC Handelsblad, 7 May 2016)

Birthmarks, Arnon Grunberg’s latest novel, is not really about his mother, but at the same time it is. Either way, it is a very personal book. ‘As I was writing, I sensed: this one is different. Writing is always an emotional process, but this was something else.’

Birthmarks, the new novel by Arnon Grunberg, has not become a typical Mother’s Day Book. ‘You could not have expected me to come up with that,’ he says, smiling behind a cup of green tea at the Ambassade Hotel in Amsterdam.

Birthmarks is about Kadoke, a psychiatrist working at the Crisis Intervention Department of a Suicide Prevention Centre, who is convinced that living is a matter of not-dying. After making some very poor decisions, he proceeds to an alternative treatment of one of his patients. This patient, a woman showing self-harming behaviour, moves in with Kadoke’s mother who needs looking after. The mother has a penis. It turns out that Kadoke’s mother had passed away, but his father had taken her place because she was indispensable. Now the father is the mother — war trauma and intimate bond with her son included. Meanwhile, benign moles are growing on Kadoke’s back.

Anyone who follows Grunberg even from a distance, knows how intense his relationship with his mother was. But ‘it is not just a book about my mother. I think that sometimes, the drama you want to get across is better conveyed with lies. Not by describing precisely what it was like. My parents’ aging has actually been such an alienating process, so absurd, so comical, and yet very tragic at the same time. I wanted to accentuate the alienation. Something about my mother had to be not quite right.’

So you gave her a penis?

‘Yes, for all sorts of reasons. As I was writing, I suddenly had enough of the mother, and I wanted to get rid of her. Besides, I think older people become asexual; the dividing line between man and woman is much easier crossed. I saw my mother naked when she fell ill in 2010. She had had a uterine prolapse for a long time so — please excuse the graphic description — I saw this uterus hanging there and I remember thinking: my mother has a penis. I was really shocked by this image. It came back to me when I decided to transform her from mother into father in my novel. And there is another reason: in The Asylum Seeker you will find the same notion: people can decide to become the person they mourn for, or decide to start wearing this person’s clothes. I myself have never been tempted to dress in the clothes of any deceased, but I could imagine it as part of a grieving process: wanting to continue your life as the person who is no longer there. And that is what I wrote on my blog when my mother died: now I shall have to carry on as my mother — on my own. And then I thought: if you can become your own mother, it should also be possible to become your own wife when she is dead, including her traumas. So the war is there, but in the background. I deliberately chose not to let a camp survivor speak.

Was this ‘demothering’ a prerequisite for distance?

‘Mostly to indicate that this is a novel. And to say: we are talking about an image of the war, not about the war itself, which of course plays a significant part in my other novels too. But I haven’t been there, so I don’t do direct reports.’

Tirza is about controlling love, Tooth and Nail about the economy of love. Is Birthmarks the farewell of love?

‘No, absolutely not. This is an attempt to redefine love. True, just like Hofmeester in Tirza and Oberstein in Tooth and Nail, Kadoke falls, but he does not surrender. He puts up a huge struggle. In that sense Kadoke comes closest to me when he realizes not-dying is different from living. His idea that you are not allowed to commit suicide and that you must survive, is ultimately not enough. That may not be a promising realization, but it is an insight that can lead to renewal.’

Will your work take a new direction?

‘It very well might. I have a feeling I am not done with Kadoke yet. If anything he is someone who is open to self-reflection and someone who relates to other people in a new way. Eventually he is capable of loving care. As I was writing, I sensed: this book is different. Writing is always an emotional process, but this was something else. It was easy to think: that is because of your mother, but that is not what it was. I have been following the acute

psychiatric service Rijnmond [Rotterdam] and that has been an inspiration for this novel. What I experienced there was very intense and sometimes it would become personal. It makes you wonder where to draw the line. Where is the line between ill and normal? One can fake normality.’

One would think you did not need the emergency services for that notion; it has surfaced in your work before.

‘That is true, but now I was focusing on the paper-thin line between the external and the internal world. It is very hard to tell when a crisis starts. What really struck me is that psychiatric patients demanded a favour in return. I taught writing for two days and I had to come back to share my experiences. I myself was evaluated too and received some pretty harsh criticism. They said: we think you do not have an eye for the suffering of others. Your articles about this service [for NRC Handelsblad, the news paper publishing this interview] are nice and they are funny, but you do not see what suffering is for these people. We think that is because you have an anxiety disorder.‘

‘That night, in my hotel room, I broke down and cried, because I was devastated to hear someone say that. What kind of person are you when you have no eye for the suffering of others? As a writer and as a human being? When you do not see suffering, you have failed.

The anxiety disorder confused me too — I found it very upsetting and had to do something with it, it kept troubling me. And then you wonder: what does it mean when you do see

the suffering of others? Actually, that is awful too. My mother was still alive at the time and

I realized that indeed there were certain things I just did not want to see. And I also remember the time when my father was ill and the doctors came; I would always walk away. The survival mechanism makes sense. There is only so much co-suffering one can bear.’

Did your relationship with your mother change because you wanted to have an eye for her suffering?

‘No, I have always resisted that. If I had really had an eye for my mother’s suffering I would have become a man who had never left his mother. I wanted to live and I ruthlessly chose to put myself first. It is a dilemma; I have always taken good care of my mother. You see someone suffering and the girls who looked after my mother would say: when you are here it goes well and when you leave she gets worse. And yet I always left. You may wonder to what extent we are responsible for a loved one or a parent. How far do you have to go in self-sacrifice? That question is in this book too. I have no answer to it. It is right when people say: there are limits. When your partner becomes very ill, he no longer is a partner. And at the same time there is something very grim about that, and you do think: but what if that were me, I would not want to be discarded either.’

Was it this search for protection that kept you from reading your mother’s book on her experiences in the concentration camps?

‘Yes, I was afraid it would contain things I did not want to know.’

Her account is written in a rather dry voice though.

‘Certainly, very dry. She was not a hysteric person. She could act hysterically about me, but not about the war. She disliked people who were very dramatic about it. In her book she writes, when she learns her parents have been gassed: “I allow myself a day of grief and then I must move on.” I was raised with that toughness.’

It is in fact what you told yourself after your mother had died.

‘Yes. In a certain way I think she is pleased about this. Although I do wonder if, when you are hard on yourself, you should not empathize with yourself too, because otherwise you might push people away. Or you put them off because you keep demanding more of yourself and you think it is the only way you are allowed to live.’

Have you put people off?

‘Of course. By not communicating, by not letting them in on what is going on. When I write,

I can share everything, but not in real life. When I feel hurt, I just smile. It can be a good strategy, but in an intimate relationship it is pretty disastrous.’

You once wrote you are good at attaching, but just as good in detaching.

‘I wrote that for a mother-child conference. My mother was extremely sweet, but she could also turn and than you would simply not exist anymore. This was very confusing for me as a child. In all honesty, I see a lot of this in my own love life. This attaching and detaching is something, which, subconsciously, I have repeated. The moment something happens which makes me feel unsafe, I switch to radical detachment.’

And yet, the birthmarks in the book are benign.

‘Birthmarks are always benign. On a symbolic level: you cannot keep hiding behind your parents, you have to take responsibility for your own life and behaviour, so that is why they are benign. To accept and continue the trauma, as Kadoke and his mother choose to do, is not a bad strategy.’

Still, there is this paradox: an indispensable person turns out to be perfectly replaceable.

‘When you accept that someone is irreplaceable, you become very dependent, you create an unsafe situation for yourself. I remember thinking that if my mother were indispensable — she would threaten to leave and sometimes to commit suicide — I would have to find a replacement. And I think I have simply kept on doing just that. I am attached to people, but I always think: I need a replacement at hand. I need to have a plan B, which of course is not always a good thing in a relationship. These are survival mechanisms with very perverse side effects, which in a way jeopardize relationships.’

Did the documentary about you and your mother get in your way when writing the novel?

‘No. I have let the filmmaker do her thing, and so has my mother, it was all fine with her. It has become quite an intimate portrait, I think, and I did feel quite embarrassed when I saw it. I was ashamed of the phone calls. Some things you no longer say to your mother as a grown man. I spoke to her on the phone when I was with my English translator. Afterwards he asked: was that your girlfriend? I said: no, my mother. There is no better way of expressing shame. At the same time, it is the modus vivendi we had found together, I’ve never caused anyone harm with it.’

In your work the fictitious always loses out on reality. Is that even bearable for an author?

‘It is if you live like I do. That reality is the stone I use to sharpen myself, a measuring stick,

a research project. If the imaginary starts to outdo reality then you enter the world of delusions. Perhaps that is what I am afraid of. When I hear stories about psychoses, I can identify with them, but I could never believe those delusions. Perhaps that is my salvation, but it does also mean that sometimes you are too sceptical or distrustful.’

Is that also the only way to be ‘the man who has nothing wrong with him’, as is the case with Kadoke and as the psychiatrist told you when you were a child?

‘It is absurd that your parents send you to a psychiatrist and for him to say: this child is all right, let his parents come instead. But, certainly with this book — and perhaps that is what made it so hard to write this novel — I thought: there is something wrong with me.’

You mean the anxiety disorders and the idea of not seeing the suffering of others?

‘It is a process. I identified with Kadoke as I was writing, more so than with other characters. His behaviour is not transgressive and yet you think: something is wrong with him and then I would think: something is wrong with me. The fact that not-dying according to Kadoke equals living, is not normal. When nothing is going on, it means something is going on. There is a reason why, in this book, Kadoke is told: I will teach you what suffering is, so you will learn what love is. That is a terrible thought, but beautiful too.’

And has Kadoke learnt what love is?

‘He has, in the sense that he has arrived at a place from where he can renew himself.’

For more information about Arnon Grunberg and BIRTHMARKS, please visit the Lebowski Agency website or arnongrunberg.com.