Stories,
Ritter Publishers, Klagenfurt, Austria
Ulrike Draesner, in these prose narratives, is taking quite a risk. This is not directly in her choice of themes, for the pieces we find here are signposted to take us along unambigous, well-known paths: taking leave of mothers, fathers, ancestors, surrender of identities, dissolution of sexual roles and hierarchies, resistance to the everyday, to urbane prisons and frameworks that society imposes on you, matrices into which one is forced or which one drops out of, according to possibilities and circumstances .. more through the energy of the tension between harmlessness and catastrophe. The stories seldom begin in a harmless way and do usually not immediately issue in catastrophes, however – knives are thrown. But where do they fall?, as the story of the knife-thrower asks.
„Like the biblical Flood after drought and dust, Ulrike Draesner’s texts overwhelm the plains of the German language. She does not narrate, describe, report. Her prose is lyrical poetry; her language elemental. Its power derives from concentration, from distilling down the core that is reality. The more compressed, the more explosive. (…)“