Kim de l’Horizon accepts the German Book Prize with make-up, jewelry and a mustache. A sequin skirt, turf top and sheer bodice complete the statement outfit. Kim de l’Horizon sees himself as a non-binary person, sees himself neither clearly as a man nor as a woman, or as both at the same time.
The novel “Blutbuch” was voted the best German-language novel of the year by the jury on Monday evening in Frankfurt. The award is endowed with 25,000 euros. When the name is mentioned in the fully occupied Kaisersaal, Kim de l’Horizon jumps up, runs into the audience and hugs friends. On stage at first there is only a “Wow!”. A speech was not prepared. Then follows a tearful thank you to the mother and an a cappella song in English.
Finally, Kim de l’Horizon pulls out a hair clipper and shaves his head – as a sign of solidarity with women in Iran. The jury also chose the text “to set an example against hate, for love, for the struggle of all people who are oppressed because of their bodies”.
In their own words, the jury was “provoked and enthusiastic” about the novel. “With enormous creative energy, the non-binary narrative character in Kim de l’Horizon’s novel “Blood Book” searches for his own language,” the statement said. “What narratives are there for a body that defies conventional notions of gender?” The novel form is in constant motion, the language unfolds “an urgency and literary innovative power that provoked and inspired the jury”.
The book is a wild ride through themes and styles
Kim de l’Horizon deliberately leaves his own biography vague: the blurb of the novel published by DuMont says: “Born 2666”, Kim de l’Horizon studies witchcraft, transdisciplinarity and writes texts collectively. According to the stock exchange association, Kim de l’Horizon was born near Bern in 1992, studied German, film and theater studies in Zurich and literary writing in Biel. Ten years of writing preceded the debut novel, which had already been awarded the Literature Prize of the Jürgen Ponto Foundation.
It’s a surprise win: a book with nothing mainstream about it. The 300-page work is a wild ride through themes and styles. The conceptual starting point is a copper beech. She is standing in her grandmother’s garden, who becomes demented in the course of the story. Part of the book consists of meticulously researched material about this tree, another part consists of invented biographies of all the grandmother’s female ancestors going back to the Middle Ages.
But the novel is also a sensitively observed family drama: the Swiss “Großmeer” is an eternally monologizing dragon. During periods of stress, the unhappy mother turns into an “ice witch” who scares the child to death with her coldness. The father doesn’t matter – or at most, as a deterrent example, a man who says “Hmrgrmpf”, just “don’t say it with letters. But with limbs.”
Interwoven into this is the story of how the narrator found his or her identity. The “liquid” child first becomes a gay teenager and then a person who is so little defined that the language for it first has to be invented: “This horror tale of just two genders (…) who are exactly the opposite of each other I won’t tell you any more.”
Kim de l’Horizon writes “jemensch” and “niemensch” instead of someone and nobody, “mensch” instead of man, but that disturbs the flow of reading surprisingly little. The novel does not have a uniform shape anyway: sometimes tender, sometimes rough, sometimes theory-laden, sometimes psychological, sometimes pop-literary. To put it in Kim de l’Horizon’s own words: a “naugty text that just doesn’t want to be straight”, which “turns away, whines away, queers away”.
A courageous decision by the jury, which had to choose between six very different finalists: alongside Kim de l’Horizon were Fatma Aydemir (“Dschinns”), Kristine Bilkau (“Next Door”), Daniela Dröscher (“Lies about my mother”), Jan Factor (“Trottel”) and Eckhart Nickel (“Spitzweg”) on the shortlist. You will receive 2500 euros each. For the first time since 2010, when Melinda Nadj Abonji won with the novel “Tauben flew up”, the 2022 book prize will go to Switzerland again.
The German Book Prize would like to draw attention “to the complexity of German-language literature,” said Karin Schmidt-Friderichs, Head of the German Book Trade Association, at the award ceremony. The winning title is also “an invitation to expand the limits of our own perception. At best, we can get each other out of our filter bubbles and get ourselves and others thinking, rethinking and thinking ahead.”
