One of the most immediate things pain teaches us is that there are no words to express pain. It is precisely this that makes Michael Lentz’s Motherdying such an achievement, for its subject matter is the universal and inescapable pain of losing one’s mother. 

Now translated into English for the first time, Motherdying was recognised in Germany as a work of literary brilliance. In 2001, it won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, with critics acknowledging it as a necessary break from the platitudes of mourning.

Motherdying is at once a chronicle of the dying body and a psychic inventory of grief. The narrator’s childhood self watches flies caught in wet paint on a whitewashed house; his father retrieves a box of love letters, long put away but never discarded; his mother can no longer bear to look out the hospital window. For Lentz, language is material. A student of sound-actionist Josef Anton Riedl and a saxophonist-composer of the German avant-garde, he fuses literature and sound alongside his ensemble, Sprechakte X/TREME. In Motherdying, the language of pain is not figurative: a cry or scream doesn’t point outward; it simply occurs. Words and sentences fuse or break apart. Memories, quotations, and history surface unannounced, without a supervising consciousness to explain them. In Lentz’s prose, grammar doesn’t express grief – grammar is the grief.

Like Ornette Coleman’s music, Samuel Beckett’s plays, or Gertrude Stein’s poetry, Motherdying announces an avant-garde voice and a new possibility of expression. For an age struggling to articulate loss, it is less a novel than a lexicon for the unspeakable, affirming every death matters and every absence merits its own broken language. Its music is discordant, unfinished, unresolved – and we must listen, because it plays for us all.

7 x 10.8 cm, paperback, isolarii (New York).