My father - the cook of the queen
"I think I'm like my father in some ways," says Liane Dirks. It is certainly not easy to say that because as a child Liane Dirks suffered from her father. We sit in the bright writing and reading room of her small house in the south of Cologne and drink deliciously scented Indian tea. "I also lived a risky life, full of fractures," she explains. Her decision to become a writer, for example, was anything but a rational decision. "But I really knew from one day to the other, I have to get out of here." Without a word, she quit her job at the employment office, packed her bags, left the city and her husband. "I went to Paris, rented myself to the cheapest hotel, and lived there for months, with a baguette and coffee, and written poems." A fine laugh over the teacup. "They were all awful!"
What Liane Dirks serves is absurd, strange and delicious
Souvenirs from a life of breaks: Liane Dirks has been at home in Barbados, France and Mexico.
That's been many years and now six novels ago. In three of them she has dealt with her father. Günther Dirks was a quarter of a runner, a cruel force man who destroyed everything he had built up, who had to flee, finally caught and started again. Again and again. When she was eleven years old, Liane Dirks saw her father for the last time. In her novel "Four ways to bury my father" she has tried to finalize with him. At that time she was in her mid-forties. "I think I had to bury him for me so he can be resurrected," she says. Then she could reinvent him as a character literary, playful, mysterious. In her new novel "The Cook of the Queen", the father has remained a drinker, but has become a nerd, a seeker. A brilliant cook and a good storyteller.
On the table in front of us are a few photos. They show a chef in full dress, with ellenlanger chef's hat on his head and a heavy medal necklace around his neck. "There is a lot in this face," says Liane Dirks, "something soft, wit, pride and yet a certain timidity." Her father's name was Andreas with a second name. In the book she gave him the name Anders. The German cook has fled to a poorer district of a Southeast Asian city. Every afternoon, every evening, the little place where he cooks is filled to the last seat. His big dream is to cook his guests the best food in the world and to experience a moment of pure, pure happiness. But when that seems close enough, the master chef's plans are thwarted: he has to step in at a state banquet given by the dictator for the highest possible visit, for the English queen.
What a filou.
That her father actually cooked once for the Queen, Liane Dirks learned by accident. After a reading from the "Four ways to bury my father" in the Hamburg Literature House was suddenly an older couple in front of the author and introduced himself as a great-uncle and great aunt. Liane Dirks had known nothing about them. They made an appointment and met to talk for four days. "It was a healing process for me, and probably for both of them," she recalls. At last she learned how her father had really died, in Spain, lonely and impoverished. And she heard of his heyday: when he had the kitchens of the three Sheraton hotels in Singapore under his belt, when he once cooked Suharto at a state banquet in 1974, and another time the English queen, on a cruise ship. "What a filou," thought Liane Dirks, as the two told this, "one who brings all who are close to him into misery, and then that!" It resonates indignation in her voice when she talks about it. And, surprisingly, also a dose of sympathy.
Lange Schatten: The memories of her father have long been followed by Liane Dirks.
For the novel "The Cook of the Queen" she gave the father a new life, played with the set pieces of his biography and the problematic common relationship. "This is very redemptive, liberating," explains the author, "and it's fun." Liane Dirks takes a sip of tea. She takes the time to talk, her thoughts, listens. There is so much on her face: love of life above all, and a low pain, a strange mixture of presence and distance, and a good deal of strength and certainty. "The core of every creative activity is openness to me," she says. "When I open up, something starts to emerge, and then it's all about staying as relaxed as possible, staying as open as possible, and watching what I want to tell.And so, I really think, a new truth is born. "
A drunkard has remained the father in "The Cook of the Queen", an adulterer, violent culprit and liar. But some guests of the small restaurant, who only know his culinary art, not his character, consider him a saint. For the dessert of his miracle, he goes in search of "Draupadi's tears", a legendary variety of berries: "No sooner is the thin skin of the berries crushed on the palate, flows through one's pure well-being," notes Anders, as he tastes them, " not only in the mouth, it runs through the whole body, it goes from head to toe, you are happy, only because you bite on a berry. " Although he knows that the Queen of England will not touch the exotic fruits, he can not abandon them. Finally, he disguises them as "Draupadis Dream - a fantasy of chocolate, ice cream and wine jelly". Are these berries really available? The author laughs: "I will not tell you!"
Liane Dirks: "The Queen's Cook" (219 p., 18 euros, Ark)
When they are served up in the novel, the master chef has long since resorted to the whiskey bottle. "These are all pigs, for which we cook here," he has sounded. And he shouted at the guards, "He's a murderer!" And yet history is coming to a happy end. "The Queen's Cook," however, is more than a turbulent novel about a curious state visit, more than the delicious story of an absurd mission, a crash and a miraculous rescue. He is a subtle, stimulating reflection on the connection between cooking, telling and understanding. "If a novel is really successful," says the author, "then we can not formulate what we have understood, which is similar to a very good meal, because you can taste the individual ingredients, but still experience that The magic of a new, unique taste, and if it is really well done, you can not describe it, at most rewrite it or just tell it. "
