Lauren Groff
Florida
stories
Hanser Berlin, Berlin 2019
ISBN
9783446264106
Hardcover, 320 pages, 22.00 EUR
—
Blurb
From the American by Stefanie Jacobs. Stories of wild animals, extreme storms and the person who is the greatest threat. Tales like the place they are named after – Florida: wild and beautiful, blazing bright, dark and unpredictable. A mother runs into anger and doubt night after night, two girls are left alone in the wild, a young woman gives up all possessions. Situations change, and people transform themselves in the shimmering heat of Florida, which is much more than a country here: an atmosphere in which everything that makes life thrive, and especially when you least expect it, the familiar Surface breaks through.
–
Review note on Neue Zürcher Zeitung, January 10, 2020
For the reviewer Michael Schmitt, the attraction of Lauren Groff’s rather dark narrative volume seems to result above all from a successful balance of terror. Here, the author tells of people in Florida whose psyche reflects the threatening environment in the form of restlessness, disorientation or overgrowth, according to Schmitt: a restless mother, a homeless woman, two abandoned children. The reviewer emphasizes that the author does not relentlessly deliver her characters to such nightmares, but also lets them pass by again and again. From a linguistic point of view, too, he liked that Groff did without psychologizations and rather conveyed the inner life of her protagonists through the precise description of “speaking actions”. The essence of Groff’s stories is an almost soothing decivilization in moments of “increased intensity”, the reviewer says, and the calm balances the terror, he concludes.
–
Review note for Süddeutsche Zeitung, 03.01.2020
Reviewer Meike Fessmann is impressed by Lauren Groff’s new narrative volume with stories of failed academics, abandoned children and overwhelmed mothers who are also stories about climate change, the reviewer said. Across the board, the realistic narratives are characterized above all by their physicality and the reversal of the inside and outside, Fessmann is amazed and is enthusiastic about the narrative power that the “precise and structuring” author brings with her, but which, however, is largely successful ) German translation by Stefanie Jacobs is lost in places. In particular, the reviewer extensively discussed the last story about a mother and writer, who reached her limits in her mother role and in the awareness of the climate catastrophe, and praised the balance between “panic and lackeyness”. A highly narrated book, which the “uncanny of the present” gets hold of without any dystopia, says the reviewer.
Read the review at
buecher.de
–
Review note for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 17th, 2019
Reviewer Verena Lueken would like to miss Lauren Groff’s eleven short stories because of their “plump” sensuality because of the subtitle “Tropical Melodrama”. How the author, who lives in Florida but did not grow up there, lets her archetypal female characters, usually only titled “the woman”, “the mother” or “the sister”, fight with heat and sultry, hallucinations and feelings with a distant view of the Lueken finds the American state and yet “atmospherically dense” admirable: When her groff tells of worms, panthers, snakes and beetles and thereby short-circuits the elemental force of man and nature, the critic also likes to forgive the few not so strong stories.
Read the review at
buecher.de
–
Review note for Die Zeit, 11/28/2019
Florida – once a natural paradise, then exploited for decades by the vacation and real estate industry, and for some time now threatened by forces of nature which man can no longer master. Lauren Groff writes about this new, threatened Florida in her short stories. The concern for nature and at the same time the fear of it run through Groff’s stories like a “basso continuo”, explains reviewer Eva Behrendt. Again and again she exposes her characters to the dangers, leaving two little girls alone on a storm-ridden island, a young traveler with a dubious rescuer, a seriously injured mother alone with her sons in a game hut. Again and again they are confronted with their deepest fears. Only at the last moment did the author bring her predominantly female protagonists back to safety. Here, according to Behrendt, she resembles the mothers in their stories, which are repeatedly seduced, to relinquish their responsibility, then still reflect and fight for their children. The author also looks at the social differences in Florida, writes about homelessness and poverty, about “above and below”. Her language is versatile and changeable, sometimes simple and dry, then colorful and rich in pictures, so the touched reviewer, whose praise also includes the translator.
–
Review note for Die Tageszeitung, 07.11.2019
Anger, doubt, love and fear are four of the recurring and competitive feelings in Lauren Groff’s tales. Her characters are mostly female, explains reviewer Carola Ebeling, multi-layered women, driven by contradicting emotions and needs that find a “vibrating resonance space” in the nature of Florida – the scene of most stories – according to the reviewer. Groff describes moments when loneliness, fear and lies lie together, painfully direct and yet empathetic, says Ebeling. For the often conflicting emotions of her characters, she finds touching and delicate images, which she contrasts with humor and a laconically casual tone, praises the reviewer, who also attests Groff a good feeling for current topics.
–
Review note on Deutschlandfunk Kultur, 11/01/2019
“Excellent reading material” advertises reviewer Daniel Haas with this narrative volume by the American author Lauren Groff, now also available in German. In the eleven short stories he mainly encounters women who are torn between motherhood and emancipation, their own demands and traditions, who ponder their fate and who are on the brink of the “revolt”. The critic finds the way Groff condenses this “mood of rising dangers” so virtuoso that he is not shy about comparing it to Guy de Maupassant.
—
