Blood beech, bloodline, "Blood book" by Kim de l'Horizon

A story about family, identity, class boundaries, friendship, love, physicality, witchcraft, violence and a tree: the blood beech. The autofictional novel "Blood Book" by Kim de l'Horizon is all that - and so much more. Eleven years of work went into "Blutbuch" before it was published in 2022 and won both the German and Swiss Book Prize in the same year. The reader is quickly swept away by the flow of poetic language into a plot that is difficult to summarize.

"The child soon has to decide. People ask. NA YOU. WHAT ARE YOU? BUB OR MEITSCHI? He looks at the other children. Most of them have already made up their minds. They stand in a row of two and look expectantly. The child wonders: How does this decision work? Is it a magical process? Do you have to tell the sea of language? That sits in your body. And she gives you a magic spell. You have to say it so often. Until the sentence grows into your flesh. Until the sentence intertwines. Embodied. Bleeds over."

In five parts, each characterized by its very own linguistic style, the non-binary character Kim tells of growing up, being an adult, her own body and her place in the midst of her own family history - the search for herself. Interwoven with this search for the roots of the maternal side of the family, which is traced back to the 14th century and broken down, is research into the cultural history of the copper beech, the tree that stands in the garden of the family home.

The narrator Kim cannot free herself from her mother and grandmother - she follows the lives of the women in this family who lived centuries before them and who are characterized by magic and witchcraft - in order to possibly find herself at the end of this search. Traumas are revealed that have been passed down through a multitude of generations, inscribed in the bodies and souls of the characters, and everyone has to find a way of dealing with their own roots.

"What I want to say, Grossmeer: there is a void, and I don't know if it's mine. Perhaps this void is an heirloom, perhaps it is an empty space that is passed on, into which each generation loses its own. A hole where each generation weaves its own threads into the void. I don't mean that in a subtle psychological way, but in a very concrete way."

In the meandering, non-linear narrative flow, sometimes these life stories are retold, sometimes the narrator addresses the grandmother suffering from dementia (Grossmeer, as she is called in reference to the Swiss dialect) directly in the form of letters and then we find ourselves again in very harsh, self-destructive to repulsive descriptions of sexual encounters that are not for the faint-hearted and actually require a trigger warning. Written in a poetic and captivating style, Kim de l'Horizon presents a sometimes brutal, mercilessly frank content in "Blood Book", a painful story of the suffering of a genderfluid person.

"I don't know how else to express myself other than: I don't know a language for my body. I can move neither in the language of the sea nor in the language of my peers. I stand in a foreign language. Maybe that's one of the reasons for writing, for this fragmented, fragmented writing."

This demanding novel finds its own way of telling the story, it is experimental, something that has never been read before in this form and you have to want to get involved with it. With its powerful language and imagery, this book triggers a whole range of emotions; at times it is astonishment, irritation and being completely lost in the middle of the plot all at the same time, because it is not always easy to follow the whole. It is a break with convention, a rejection of linear storytelling and is characterized by a very conscious and skilful use of language - an alternation of High German, Swiss dialect and English. An innovative, poetic, queer and radical novel - which really hurts in places.