«Marta and Arthur, venom on the lips

Originally published in 2019 in Germany, Marta und Arthur reached French-speaking readers two years later, thanks to a translation by Barbara Fontaine for Editions Zoé. A journalist based in Switzerland, Katja Schönherr has written a remarkably virtuosic first novel, as noxious as it is irresistible.

Marta. Arthur. Two individuals, two opposing personalities, two paths that diverge only to cross again, two linked destinies. «Marthur. One love. One hatred. Their couple: toxic. Rarely have I read a novel that made me so uncomfortable! There's an unhealthy smell around this story that grabs you by the gut and doesn't let go. And yet, you can't put it down. Worse still, we devour it! From the very first pages, you can feel that something is not quite right.

«There's nobody on the beach but Marta. Hundreds of abandoned shells, thin broken legs and claws washed up by the waves are scattered on the ground; a battlefield of dead crabs.»

With very few words, Katja Schönherr creates a strange, unstable atmosphere. Nothing seems to be in its place, everything seems dissonant. Marta leaves the beach and returns to the marital apartment, sandbag under her arm. Then, very conscientiously, she covers her husband with the same sand. Perhaps he's asleep. He doesn't react, doesn't move, doesn't breathe. He's dead. The story then returns to Marta's childhood, her conflicted relationship with her mother, her encounter with Arthur, her high school teacher. Then it skips the years and returns to this almost ceremonial burial.

The narration alternates constantly between Marta's past of the budding romance and the present with Arthur's death, creating a rollicking motion. The more we turn the pages, the more the contours of their life together are revealed, and above all, the more we wonder what they've been doing together for forty years. Their union conceals only the shreds of a silent cataclysm. The debris of a poisonous mutism, which meekly insinuates itself over the years until it first sclerotizes souls. Then the bodies. Parched skins crackle with buried pain. The kind you can't scrape off without ripping out everything. 

Katja Schönherr plunges us into the throes of a relationship built on rejection, thanks to her meticulous and sensitive writing, between tension and pitch, of a relentlessly silent uproar, to find out what could have driven these two beings towards each other. No trash, no explosions, but all the gloom of the unspoken. An intense, atmospheric noir novel, as unsettling as it is chilling.

Write to the author: quentin.perissinotto@leregardlibre.com

Photo credit: © Pixabay License / innokurnia

Katja Schönherr
Marta and Arthur
Translated by Barbara Fontaine
Editions Zoé
2021
249 pages

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