What Concerns Us by Laura Vogt (tr. Caroline Waight)
This exceptional second novel by the Swiss writer Laura Vogt offers a fraught examination of the trials of motherhood and daughterhood. Its protagonists, two sisters who are both grappling with pregnancy and motherhood in their own ways and under very different circumstances, are at times inscrutable and unlikable, stubbornly resisting any outward attempts to smooth or simplify.
The story primarily follows Rahel, a young jazz singer who, when she discovers she is pregnant, seeks out a plain, steady man with whom to lay the foundations of her family. This man, Boris, invites her to live with him in his converted barn in the mountains, and unconventional beginning to Rahel's desperate attempts to create a nuclear family. Meanwhile, Fenna is struggling to come to terms with her boyfriend’s actions—did she consent, or was she assaulted? Is she a victim? Or should she choose to believe she had agency, even if it means living in denial?
The sisters find each other's choices mutually incomprehensible, yet each pushes the other to lay bare the reasoning that motivates them—an impossible task when the young women barely understand themselves. This incomprehension also extends to their mother, Verena, who may have made some questionable choices during their childhood, and their father who walked out on the family when the sisters were small.
The dysfunctional relationship between the three women is the foundation for everything: for Rahel's desperate search for a steadfast man to replace her absent father; for Fenna's self-flagellation in the aftermath of her boyfriend’s mistreatment; for Rahel's feelings of disconnect when attempting to bond with her baby girl. It is clear that the dysfunction at the heart of their family has imprinted on Fenna's view of gender roles. She sees her boyfriend’s violent side something inherent to being a man.
Throughout, all the women forge complex and contradictory relationships with men—and with their ideas of men. Much as Rahel tries to avoid her father by seeking out a man she believes this is total opposite, she nonetheless seems to mirror parts of her father’s story. Though she often thinks “at some point Boris would leave”, she is the one that grows absent—both mentally and, briefly, physically. She even mentions that she “felt a piece of [her father] on the inside, somehow”, the piece that echoes through her decision to briefly abandon her family—but in the end, unlike him, she decides to go home.
One refrain that repeats throughout is music: both its presence and its absence. As Rahel becomes a mother, a status that was unwittingly thrust upon her but which she seemingly embraces with open arms, she finds herself unable to connect with the music that once defined her. Yet it is Rahel who enforces this abstinence upon herself, convinced that “children and the stage [are] antonyms”. She shrugs off this integral facet of her character, and in this process of simultaneously losing herself and finding another—her child—she also loses the thing that grounds her the most. Ultimately, it is her rediscovery of music that offers her a way out of the darkness. Little by little, catalysed by her sister Fenna’s visit, she begins to rediscover herself afresh and starts putting pen to paper once again. Music is not the pure escape she once thought it was; instead, it is a way through, a means of processing the transformation she has undergone by becoming a mother.
This latest publication from Héloïse Press is all the more vital, appearing at a moment when the implications of pregnancy and motherhood are being brought into sharp focus, particularly in the Anglosphere. This is a time when the exploration of the nuance and complexity of motherhood—the ambivalence, disappointed expectations, weighty traditions and complex self-reflection that it can entail—is all the more necessary.
The writing, brought effortlessly to life in Caroline Waight’s deft translation, is, from the first, surprising and sharply observed. Laura Vogt is unafraid to expose her characters’ raw, unadulterated depths. In the end, nothing is neatly resolved, and we are left pondering the fates of these characters we have grown close to—whether through attraction or aversion. The repressed emotions within this family are finally unstoppered like so many pickle jars from Rahel’s basement, and they are a fraction closer to achieving some clarity and understanding of one another. But, ultimately, the story’s open ending and lack of easy answers for its characters reflect all the chaos and complexity of life.
What Concerns Us is published by Héloïse Press, 16th August 2022