Difficult, yet promising pairing

Hilda Steinkamp
6 days ago
4 min read

Ewald Arenz tells the story of "Love on Lousy Days"

"I want real love, 
not an affair 
and no fucking quality time
every four weeks.“

Clara snaps. Right in the middle of the story. She speaks plainly. Always. As if she owed it to her name: "Be clear."

She has just broken up with Elias. Their new love is barely six or seven weeks old. They met after cracks in both their relationship histories. A heartfelt alliance, as Elias's daughter Jule, who lives with her mother, sums it up, "like two broken halves that someone puts back together, and then you can hardly see the cracks anymore, they fit together so perfectly."

Clara and Elias

She, in her late forties, "attractive. In a stark, reserved way." He, not yet forty, "very charming," "sinewy," "all muscles as if for use, not for showing off." An unlikely couple, as Clara initially fears. Her perceived age difference vanishes as the "tingling of unfamiliarity" at the beginning of their story very quickly develops into "a tension between their bodies that demands release," until they both "fall in love." Falling in love. Clara prefers the English version. In German, sich verlieben (to fall in love) sounds too dangerous to her—because of the destructive prefix ver- . Verfall (decay), Verrat (betrayal), Verdammnis (damnation). So for her, it's not "going halfway". "It's a love like that or no love at all." The lightness of their beginning is given subtle seasoning by the witty irony of their dialogues.

The bed is not the end of the story.

Clara's tempting job offer

For her, an unemployed photographer from the provinces, becoming head of a photo department in distant Hamburg represents a career leap. But for Elias, it's a 600-km hurdle, as he feels tied to an unnamed city in southern Germany by his theater engagement as an actor and as the father of a teeange daughter.

Scattered topographical details in the novel and a quick Google search point to Bamberg. A dreamy, medium-sized town on a tranquil river with a peaceful old town. "Both towers of the cathedral", "alleys between the small houses with their tiny terraced gardens", "weathered fences and high walls", over which a cherry tree displays its fruit, promise a life of order and security, but also foreshadow stagnation.

Clara wants to get out of here.

Landscape images

With a photographic eye for detail, the narrator allows his characters to perceive weather conditions and landscapes as mirrors reflecting their emotional world. These are expressive images, depending on the nature of the relationship. In the surprisingly heavy snowfall of early spring, shortly after their first encounters, Clara recognizes a "small, friendly catastrophe": "Outside, a storm. Inside, a storm."

Elias sees in the flight of the falcon, which soars "high into the blue", carried by the wind, a sign of his "wild happiness".

Clara, on the other hand, feels her self-imposed exile in Hamburg is a monotonous "in-between time," "when the explosive power of the first blossom" in spring, "when the wave of luscious colors subsides" and everything is just green. Her laconic summary: "You live, but you don't bloom." And Elias is similarly affected when he sees an artfully woven "spiderweb in the half-shadow" in which "a few last dewdrops sparkle": "Why was the world allowed to be beautiful when everything was falling apart?"

For many weeks

nothing seems able to separate these two latecomers to love. No nostalgic reminiscences from Clara about her deceased husband, no resentment from Elias's bitter ex-girlfriend Vera, no rival teenage daughter fearing for her exclusivity in her father's world, nor the envy of her estranged mother Mona.

As if using a soft-focus lens, the author erases the well-known animosities of rival women surrounding the central male figure, animosities that appear in real life as well as in literary works, such as Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse (1954) or Helen Henckel's Why so late (2024). Arenz, on the other hand, brings Elias's women together harmoniously in a situation of crisis.

Even Clara's elderly parents – "her mother demented and her father psychotic" – don't dampen her happiness. She cares for them both with cheerful composure. And readers initially overlook the single-line disruption in the narrator's landscape code: "Not everything that blooms in spring will also bear fruit."

What moves the plot forward?

The impending separation for professional reasons? Yes, initially. It brings potential conflict to the surface. Clara feels "too old to wait for the right life, the right happiness, and the right love", if Elias doesn't move with her to Hamburg at the same time. He, however, feels he has more comfortable time left at his younger age and won't follow her for another two years, once his theater contract has expired. Commuter visits are meant to bridge the gap. Two years is too long for Clara. She doesn't believe that young love last - at her advanced age.

She leaves him.

But Clara's solo trip to Hamburg is not the end of the story. There are still a good 140 pages of reading ahead of us.

The "little thorn" of a wild rose

A footfall on a fence, which he climbed over on the day of their first meeting, led first to a neglected nail bed injury and then to a life-threatening bacterial infection. The actor fears for his body: "his tool, his capital. Movement. Voice. Strength."

Will his illness bring the lovers back together? Out of pity? A sense of duty? The need for care? Or is there something more that connects Clara and Elias?

"Perhaps you simply can't expect 
everything from love. 
Maybe love won't survive
too many lousy days.“

That's how Elias puts it, resignedly. In the spirit of the novel's title? And on his hospital bed he curses: "Damn it, did one have to die just to truly understand for the first time how fucking beautiful life was?"

Anyone who wants certainty,

whether it is truly Clara's will "to live her life alone," and whether Elias is fortunate enough to survive—despite the lack of recognized treatments for his illness—will eagerly embark on a captivating reading journey of nearly 400 pages with Ewald Arenz's novel. A reading remedy for "lousy days"!