Querida – the title of this romantic, fantastic story is aptly chosen and eloquently programmatic. It encompasses the most diverse forms of sensuality and desire - not just human - and at the same time externalizes them by reducing them to a single concept, that of the "beloved". This sensual diversity also unfolds in the chapter headings, which are as original as they are subtle. The big and small themes of the condicio humana, of human life from a social, cultural, political and, last but not least, sensual and erotic perspective, are woven into the tension of a mysterious literality, with religious elements also appearing. We follow the story of a woman who oscillates between her existence as a wooden puppet and a human female, fighting above all for her status, the status of a victim's liberation from suffering, her self-empowerment, as spelled out in the subtitle of the book. In this way the work fits particularly well into our times, in which the victim role of women still plays a very prominent role despite all emancipatory efforts:

On the one hand, the text demonstrates that this victim role is part of the (also imagined) reality of life; it even exaggerates it in the puppet figure; at the same time, however, it shows with confident clarity how it is possible to discard the role or to mark it as a mere 'role', to distance oneself from it in a variety of ways. The wooden heroine succeeds in this not entirely without the support of a social network, but it does not require her to renounce her self-confident, sensual feminine eroticism either. At the same time, Querida is a knower; she is also a highly reflective creature, as far as the density of the sequence of events in her life allows. This sequence of events leads her from a dark situation dominated by envy, hatred and unpleasant desires, as well as platonic amnesia, to the greatest possible personal and as well as erotic freedom. This urge for freedom and liberation is inherent in her from the very beginning.

 

From the very moment when the puppeteer shapes her in the image of his tragically deceased cousin, clearly with the intention of satisfying his erotic desires with her, Querida's sensually charged belligerence emerges in its delightful ambivalence: it becomes clear in every anatomical detail of the composition of her puppet's body and in her first experiences in the human world, in her radical materialization. The puppeteer tries to fixate her in her objectification; as soon as he realizes that he is losing power over her as she develops a complex (oder comprehensive) personality, he resorts to the method of anatomical fragmentation. Querida, however, resists her reduction with all the means at her disposal. She only allows herself to be led for a limited time by the puppet strings by means of which her tormentor tries to even force her to agree to his perversions, as if she had read Kleist's “Marionettentheater” and exposes the world behind the stage as a wayward theatrum mundi. And this despite the fact that she experiences the highest possible (and unthinkable) level of violence and destruction, not only from her creator, but also from an impulse-driven coachman and a devil's sidekick with the Latinized name Coppelius. The latter even goes so far as to gouge out and steal the puppet's eyes, so that she has to spend part of her story without her primary sensory organs - a perverted Medusa, so to speak. Only for a while - and only in the microcosm of the puppet theater - does it look as if Querida is inferior to the evildoers when her creator manages to turn the other puppets against her and using instruments of torture to make her the object of any interested visitor. She finally manages to get out of this predicament with the help of her friends, the giant Mangiafuoco, who is in love with her, Romeo, who is surrounded by an erotic touch, and the fairy-like woman with the deep blue name Indigo; but the text leaves no doubt about Querida's unbroken strength and the possibility that she would have made it even without Mangiafuoco, the fire-eater as a caricature of the Titan Prometheus, and the two ethereal beings.

The end result is a brutal revenge that in every respect rivals the atrocities known from ancient myths or the Bible: The mighty Mangiafuoco, now a kind of life companion to Querida, slaughters the diabolical Coppelius by biting off his head, and Querida herself assassinates the Puppeteer on the stage of the theatrum mundi demonstrating not only that life is always a drama of communication, but also that the mixture of appearance and reality, art and life, even art and nature is a highly complex one and requires the viewer to constantly walk a tightrope. It is no coincidence that there is a tantalizing tension in Querida herself as a kind of perpetuated metamorphosis (Ovid is also briefly mentioned) of human and doll, of original and copy rebelling against it.

 

In terms of production aesthetics and the history of motifs, we become aware of the entire range of artistic creation in the field of tension between nature and culture: a multi-layered variant of the concept of the artist as “alter deus”, as a god-like producer. On a plot level, the puppet maker comes to mind first, but the other characters also attempt, more or less successfully, to transcend the boundaries of (the poetically shaped) reality. On a poetological meta-level, this also has an impact on the artist, the artists who created the work: the author of the book and his - in the best sense of the word - adjutants in words and images.

 

The author Atanes succeeds in taking up a wide variety of motifs from the literature of thousands of years and relating them to one another. However, this never happens in an overly indirect manner, but leaves plenty of scope for subtle adaptations, entanglements and defamiliarizations. The panorama ranges from the ancient sculptor Pygmalion, who, with the help of Aphrodite-Venus, manages to breathe life into the beloved statue he created, to Edgar Allan Poe and E.T.A.Hoffmann's uncanny doll Olympia, to Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, whose entourage also includes the cricket, fox and cat. But the blue-haired Undine, the shocking Medusa, Danae locked in a box, Narcissus and his reflected self-knowledge problem, Phaethon's dramatic sun chariot flight and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein also appear from the textual tapestry, alongside the silhouettes of many other figures from myth and fairy tales - not least the name of the friend Romeo speaks volumes. They are all condensed into an impressive, associative cosmos, which the protagonist Querida in particular carries on her beautiful wooden shoulders and arms - which are at times pierced for the 'thread binding', as if she were carrying the burden of the entire literary motif. Yet, she manages to shake off this burden without abandoning the magic of her memory.

 

Thus, the impression of an enchanting lightness prevails, which is not only enforced by the intrinsic changes of perspective, as the story is sometimes told from the third person, sometimes from the first in the person of Querida, but also through the agile, lively style of the author Atanes: the (never excessive) tendency towards ellipses and asyndeses, towards oppositions and antitheses, helps to break through the illusions and level out the distinguishability of reality and fiction. In a nutshell, this art culminates in the junction of an “illusory non-existence” encountered in the novel.

                                                                             

Melanie Möller / 2024