Judith Hermann: "I think as little as possible about what I'm writing"

Walking through the restrained elegance of Edinburgh's Charlotte Square towards Judith Hermann's hotel, a scene from her latest book, Alice , comes irresistibly to mind. Alice has arranged to meet the former lover of an uncle who committed suicide just before she was born, almost 40 years before. She arrives at the hotel where he is staying and asks the clerk at reception to call up to the room to say she's there. "Alice knew that Frederick, sitting in the armchair next to the suddenly ringing telephone must have flinched in shock," Hermann writes. "Even though he had been waiting for it to ring. Just because of that." But Hermann is not waiting in her room today – I'm a little early, so I wait for her in the lobby. When she arrives she waves away the notion that she might have been avoiding such a moment herself, that a call from reception on this occasion would have troubled her in the slightest. Tall, smart, her hair scraped back behind her head, Hermann sits her chair with such an air of self-possession that the idea her composure could be disturbed by something so banal seems suddenly ridiculous. After all, she continues, "Frederick is waiting in a particular way". Hermann is in Edinburgh as one of two authors published in the launch season of a new imprint, The Clerkenwell Press . Alice is the third book of short fiction the German writer has produced, after 1998's The Summer House, Later and 2003's Nothing But Ghosts . It consists of five interlinked short stories, each of which brings Alice face to face with mortality. Death comes unexpectedly in Tuscany, with agonising slowness in a town near Germany's border with France, after meticulous planning in Berlin, but it is always there. In one story, Alice sits at the bedside of a former lover who is in a morphine daze, turned toward the window "like a plant", while an old, wrinkled nun asks "what sort of man he had been" – a question which confronts her with her inability to explain a life. She stops to buy an ice cream at a petrol pump on her way back from the hospital, but her friend is not "doing much better", as the doctors have assured her; instead his heart has "fibrillated and stopped beating, just like that, and no goodbye". He has specified "No sermon by the minister" at his funeral and "sandwiches with plum jam, meatballs and beer" for after. But despite the number of deaths it describes, Hermann insists that this "not a book about dying, it's a book about living," More particularly, she insists with a penetrating stare, it's about "living while somebody is dying." Like all her stories, Alice grew out of an "autobiographical kernel", a moment from her own life which she wanted to explore. The last five years have been "filled with loss" of various kinds, though she is quick to close off discussion of what those losses might have been. For an author born in 1970 it's "totally normal" to have experienced the loss of friends and family, she continues; death is part of life. "How old are you?" she asks, "and have you never lost anyone?" The first kernel grew into the opening story, set in Zweibrücken, where a former lover of Alice's is slowly dying out of reach of his wife, leaving Alice to to look after his child. The toddler has begun to cry unconsolably on the road to visit her father. Hermann says she wanted to explore the "atmosphere" of Alice living for a few days with her former lover's family, and of the time she spends with the dying man at the hospital. "When I finished this story I was a little bit scared," she continues. If she wanted to put it together with others it wouldn't be "possible to write other stories about travelling or about a couple." Her response was to construct the book "like variations on a theme, like a corona around this point". Three more stories followed, with Alice living through the contrasting loss of two friends and trying to make sense of a death from long ago, but then Hermann says she felt there was one story missing. "I needed a bit of a long time to find out that in the last story it's Alice herself," she continues. She decided that Alice had to lose her partner Raymond – a character who had already appeared in a supporting role. "It was a little bit weird, because he was already there. I did feel like someone announcing a death." She's slipping in and out of German, apologising for her imperfect mastery of a language learned only at school and then practised during a year spent working for a German newspaper in New York before returning to Berlin. She traces the roots of her writing to the letters she sent back home from New York. Her instinctive way of working, which she describes as like knowing "the room of the story" and finding "the right moment to get into this room, but with my eyes closed", leaves little space for reflection on where her stories come from, or where she might be heading next. "I think as little as possible about what I'm writing, what I want to write," she says. She rejects the idea that it's a question of romantic inspiration, she "just starts. But I get one go at it. Just one. I have to get it right first time." So it's "an accident" that the characters who die are all men, she says, "I didn't mean it. At the end I saw that it's just men who are dying and I thought maybe I should write another story with a dying woman" but it was already finished. The doctors who shrug their shoulders, or say the dying man will be home soon, or make a patient's last words incomprehensible because of the risk of choking on false teeth are not there to criticise the medical profession; it's "just the way it is. There comes the point when you can't do anything, it's just over. Doctors can't make you immortal." She nods politely at the suggestion that the short story came naturally to her as a form and shakes her head at the idea that the linked stories of Alice are an indication that a novel might be next. "We have a phrase in Germany that it's not the writer who decides how long the text has to be, it's the text that decides," she says. "Sometimes it's like the story finishes itself, it finds its own end." When it happens like that "it's very special, a little bit magical. Then it's right." The end comes for the third story with Alice still waiting to hear that a friend has died. Looking for the phone so that it'll be right next to her if it rings, she finds a book of science fiction left open by her partner and begins to read. Hermann says she has "great difficulty with the fact that things pass by". For her, writing is a way "to put something in the way of time … to pick a little moment up from the river of time". She pauses, looks around at the hustle and bustle of life in the lobby and continues to add in German that "in a wider sense" writing – all writing – is a way of fending off death.