SARA TRÖSTER KLEMM

It has been a long time coming, but at last the wait is over. In my first major novel Faustkampf – Memoiren einer ausrangierten Mitbewohnerin (Fist fight – memoirs of a discarded roommate) I have embarked on a new journey. At the moment, I'm is in the process of finding a suitable publisher for the completed work. The second novel is already in the making, since for this author of five art books writing is as vital as breathing.

What is it about?
Shared accommodation is immensely popular among students, not least because there are no alternatives. There is hardly a student who wants to miss out on this, experience which allows him or her to mature, grow up – and sometimes go off the rails a bit. The story takes off in Paris. Lea is suffering from claustrophobia and loneliness and wonders how she got herself into such a dire situation. She is struggling with nights spent on her own, which is all the more understandable because she has already reeled in her storybook prince. But he lives in a different world, far away in a bleak small town. Lea keeps taking decisions which she ends up questioning after a while and even her sudden impulse to live on her own is nothing but the highly dramatic escape attempt of a young, idealistic woman. An escape from herself? Her obsessively rosy dreams of harmonious coexistence in a shared student apartment are brutally shattered, the “sharing community” becomes a haunted house.
Before the disaster unfolded, Lea had a clear idea of what she wanted. She shared her first flat with the hot-blooded Latino musician Enzo, hoping that salsa and long nights would colour her life going forward. That was the plan. But instead of moving in himself, Enzo puts two Italian girls into the apartment. Over time, a colourful array of people move in and out of the flat, a sister, her friends, a cousin, an aunt, other friends… And the numbers are growing. Soon, Lea has no idea who will be smoking, munching and slurping at her dinner table in the evening and who those people are who sleep in her flat and come out of the shower naked, leaving their underwear lying everywhere and half-empty glasses to rot in the kitchen sink. Then Lea moves in with Micha, a sensitive architecture student who is also a great cook. Lea’s cosy ideas are at last becoming reality. Friends, parties, a shabby, worm-eaten dining table and a shower cubicle discreetly tacked on to the kitchen. Her life is perfect. Until a dreadful character rises from the depths. Mandy Maulzahn cosies up to Micha, at first as a friend, but then she ends up staying – on a purely temporary basis – for eighteen months. Mandy’s creed is that if you don’t pay rent, you don’t have to do the cleaning. She often offends Lea, who turns out to be rather bourgeois and boring deep down, with her theories – which she delights in presenting with plenty of curses and swearwords. The flat goes to seed, there is mould in the shower and the stack of dirty dishes has reached the ceiling, but Lea tries NLP to convince herself that without a certain level of chaos it would not be a real student flat share.
 

Lea, the twenty-year-old heroine of the novel, describes her absurd journey with a dry sense of humour somewhere between fantasy and stoicism. It takes her through countless groups of people until she ends up in a shoebox flat in Paris. Soon the new harmony becomes brittle and is revealed as a child of an all-too-persuasive tourist industry. But Lea insists on believing in her good luck and nothing can persuade her otherwise.