How to Love the World Written by Ilka Tampke review – woman caught by a fallen tree | Fiction

A A large branch falls to the ground in the forest one morning. After some time, a woman named Nellika woke up. “On the stomach, on the cheek full of dirt, the big trees crossed, the edge of the rail was strangely straight. The branch hit him in the back, and now he is trapped, in great pain. “How could it be the tree that did this to him?” they are surprised.

This event launches two installments of Ilka Tampke’s new book, How to Love the World. The first is the delay of the clock; The sub-headings record time as it passes, and the pressing of this book was made possible by the gradual spread of this day. Will Nellika somehow manage to free him? Will the prince appear? The book is told in the third person very intimately, so there is no idea for the reader whether this is a survivor’s tale or not. I don’t doubt that.

The second season is characterized by the repeated sub-heading “In the beginning”, as in, what happened to Nellika before the accident. A heated argument with his young children that morning. Her life before that, as an artist, mother, daughter, friend. “In the beginning” is Nellika’s story, told in fragments, and it is not very interesting. A picture emerges of a self-proclaimed “difficult” child, who was neglected and sometimes shamed for being “too much”. Nellika comes to understand that her parents gave her pain, and she wants to give something different – “safety and food” – to her children. But he cannot control his fierce anger; “Like a threatening dog, he attacks”. This article remains alive with the possibility of revision. Nellika’s mother and father later apologized for the bad things they did to their daughter. Nellika’s efforts to repair relationships damaged by her anger are relentless.

Nellika’s daily walks in the forest helped her escape from inter-generational violence, “removing the shame of being seen”. As the novel’s long day continues, his act of caring for the forest becomes a way of survival – “He stuck to everything, letting the tree wake up.”

Trapped under the heavy branch, he sees a leaf fall and is “surprisingly moved to see the exact moment of its fall, to look at its level, when it should have died but not before”. The best writings in the book show Nellika’s interest in her surroundings. He recalls: “I have never looked at one thing for so long.”

Nellika has no relationship with the world where she will die. This realization disturbs him: “Suddenly the great wound of his lack of place surrounded him, and he felt its pain, in his broken and torn bones.” As Nellika she reckons with the past and the forest that brings her back to the present.

I share the political philosophy of How to Love the World. This is the work of decolonial ecofeminism, an expression of deep immersion in the superhuman world and its wisdom. I read this book the first time I read it, turning the pages as it went, as they often do. I needed to know if Nellika survived or not and I wanted to put behind me the sad events of domestic violence.

But this is a book that demands to be read slowly, regardless of the new twists in Nellika’s adventures. For my next reading, this is the way I go, but most of the time the writing still has the finesse it needs to give that impression. We are a group of women who want to describe the world fairly, capture every page that falls, remember every aspect of domestic disputes, every comment. Tampke is careful about the use of figurative language, favoring the more formal types that would appear in a field report. The result is a list of detailed information, some of which are prohibited. Nellika has to process everything in real time.

It’s a lot to ask of the reader, to spend several hundred pages with a poor woman trapped under a log as she tries to figure out her life and hopefully be saved. Nellika’s effort, her insight and her reformation, her perseverance overwhelmed me and sometimes exhausted me.

But I talked a lot about How to Love the Earth and the people around me when I was trying to fix my thoughts on it. This is a sign of a book that has left a mark. In particular I talked about how I wanted to love a book that is not afraid of trying to think about the nature of the place, and willing to establish a protagonist who is not only injured but has injured the people around him.

How to Love the World is very rich with the concept of true purpose. This focus and commitment hinders the book’s style, but the questions it asks are not necessarily actionable. Through Nellika, Tampke asks her readers who live with her to think deeply about what it means to live and die on a land where we do not have a deep connection with our ancestors, to let go of our colonial ideas that we have and find a way to love the world as it is.