Turkey, chicken salad, ham and cheese, grilled vegetables – these are the ingredients on four sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil, which suddenly become the subject of dispute on a Friday evening. Four people try to get a piece of it, they insult each other, blame each other, and even get physical.
What on earth went wrong here? A lot: It starts with Delia ringing Ava’s doorbell, who is just getting cozy with her date Robin. Delia was a guest the night before and is now looking for the cell phone that was left in the apartment.
An unpleasant situation that becomes even more stressful when Silvia suddenly storms through the hallway of the high-rise building. Ava has been ignoring her for weeks and wants to confront her.
The commotion becomes too much for Ava, she runs up the stairs to the roof, her lovers following her, the door slams shut and the four of them are locked out. And since no one has a charged cell phone with them, they can’t call for help.
The starting point in Hengameh Yaghoobifarah’s second novel “Vertigo” is somewhat reminiscent of Nick Hornby’s “A Long Way Down” from 2005, in which four people also met on the roof of a high-rise building – but by chance and with the plan to kill themselves. Since that doesn’t work well with an audience, they tell each other about their lives instead.
Yaghoobifarah also looks at the backstories of her characters in flashbacks, with Ava taking the central role as the (ex-)lover of the other three. We learn how she met Robin, Delia and Silvia, what she has in common with them and that they know about each other. “I told you all from the beginning where you stand. Complete transparency. What else do you want from me?” she exclaims at the beginning of the evening.
Orthography is queered
Silvia, for example, wants to know why Ava is ghosting her. Apparently she has fallen in love with the much younger woman. A flirtation turned into something more, but at some point it stopped. The feelings were not equally strong for both of them. This also applies to Ava and Robin, in this case they are more intense on Ava’s side than on Robin’s.
What this looks like with Delia remains somewhat hidden in the fog of the many joints that the two smoke together. In general, the non-binary character Delia (pronouns: dey/demm) seems the least tangible, which on the other hand fits with her fluid identity.
Delia’s passages are written in lowercase, and the typeface is also played with repeatedly. Sometimes a sentence runs in a spiral, words are placed one below the other instead of next to each other, or a sex scene is depicted with a dozen “~” characters scattered across the page, at the bottom of which you can read “let yourself be driven by desire.”
The orthography is queered, so to speak, which visually reflects the book’s already high queerness factor. Yaghoobifarah uses the very different protagonists to create a broad lesbian-queer spectrum, while also touching on sexual practices, language politics and generational conflicts.
“Vertigo” cleverly addresses the topic of transition in a lesbian relationship using Robin, who has been with Ivo for years but is apparently missing something: “She liked the idea of awakening intense feelings in women. It had been a long time. Ava brought lesbianism back into her life. As long as Ava was there, Robin was more than just an involuntary straight woman.”
Fast pace and a deus ex machina
Hengameh Yaghoobifarah doesn’t usually overload the novel, but occasionally a little too much is squeezed in, for example when Silvia quickly survives cancer and loses a lover and many friends to the virus at the height of the AIDS crisis. The fast-paced, sketchy style seems jumpy and erratic in these moments, just like in the relatively implausible deus ex machina ending.
This is one of the biggest differences to the strong Debut novel “Ministry of Dreams” from 2021who told the story of Berlin’s Butch Nas and the mysterious death of her sister with greater calm and depth of focus. This also meant that the plot was clearly located geographically, culturally and chronologically. All that can be said about “Vertigo” is that the novel is set in the present day in a big city – at one point there is mention of a golden suspension bridge, which could be a reference to Düsseldorf.
While Nas came from an Iranian family, Yaghoobifarah never gets so specific in the Dachquartett. The only thing that can be deduced is that Silvia’s family probably has no migration history – unlike that of Robin and Ava. This has a nice casualness and counteracts the exclusionary white German obsession of always wanting to find out where the “roots” of people who are perceived as “different” supposedly lie.
The setting is almost like a laboratory experiment in which the feelings and traumas of a queer polycule are dissected, with unexpected connections and reactions emerging. Reading this can make you dizzy – not the worst feeling for coming up with new ideas.
