Simone Meier’s novel about Jo van Gogh-Bonger will crush you all

I once heard somewhere that when you die, you become history. Isn’t that the most beautiful thing that can happen to you when you look at it from a distance and from a distance? You dissolve, disappear, at best after a long, fulfilling life, and what remains are the many little stories about you, about your activities on earth, your comments about life itself and that of others, summarized in one pithy sentence (“De Reto ischo alles en Schofseckel gsi”), condensed into a gag or stirred into your flourless chocolate cake recipe. And every time someone digs up these pieces of life lived, when you are remembered and told, or when a great-grandchild serves up that overly greasy, brown belt of death, you come back to life a little.

And this will continue until your family tree dies out – or you grow tired of passing on your accumulated wisdom and perverse recipes to its descendants.

Eternity only exists for those who have lived a spectacular life that humanity cannot avoid in a century, or if you have a Simone Meier. At best you have both, and that’s what happened here.

Johanna van Gogh-Bonger met Simone Meier. Or the other way around, who knows for sure.

All I know is that what came out, “The Inflamed,” is a masterpiece. A book like a fire-breathing throwing star that gets stuck in people and causes damage.

It is the story of the woman who ‘at one point managed to pour all the colorful self-prosperity of Vincent van Gogh onto the world’. To make him, the sensitive, crazy painter, world famous. So that the photos of the drinking and smelly outsider who gave his ear one Sunday and his life the next are now among the most expensive paintings in the world.

But it is also the story of Gina, a student with autistic traits and an obsession with bloody bandages, who throws herself into Jo’s life. It is the story of a loving, but especially suffering because of his failed father, whose writing is rather a mistake.

«[…] I must admit that the idiot can write beautifully. Not in such a way that you stop breathing and think: wow, a genius, what an honor to have him as a father and to have emerged from his inimitable substance. Father is more of a quiet master, someone who writes about the dying sounds in the mist even on the hottest day at sea. And about how a mysterious woman in a blackberry-colored dress clears the fog. The color of the blackberry is important. Violet or purple would be too loud. Women always lift something from Father, just nothing essential, like an anchor.”
From “The Inflamed”

But above all, it is the story of a visualization in a double sense: that of the exceptional artist through Jo, and that of Jo through Simone.

My mother always says that a sauce should be round. And if she isn’t, she’s still missing something. Or there is too much of something. No flavor should stand out too much, everything has to be right, it has to fit together, it has to be right. A few drops of Worcestershire sauce usually helps.

Simone Meier is like Worcestershire sauce. And her book is not only round and right, it is even rounder and more right.

Because it is not real life, but great literature. It may spill over the side of the pan, in fact, it should boil over, foam and burn our skin with its hot oil splatters. And that’s what Simone does. With all her incomparable linguistic power. Nothing is simple here. Nothing held back. Everything is palpable, intensely felt, and mercilessly imprinted on the reader, like the flowers on Gina’s grandmother’s champagne glasses, modeled after Queen Marie-Antoinette’s breasts. Or like the syphilis that eats itself through Jo’s husband Theo, through the prostitute in her dream and through so many other people of this century.

«[…] The woman removes the mask from her face, Jo lets out a scream, Ninette’s lips are eaten away, dead skin hangs between the exposed, rotten rows of teeth, her tongue, Jo thinks, Ninette is chewing her own dead tongue, her cheeks are covered in bumps there is a black hole where the nose is and the eyelids are filled with pus. And then Ninette reaches into her shiny red hair, pulls the wig off her head, and Jo sees in horror that the top of her skull is open in several places, as if it has melted, as if Ninette’s head has been in acid, and Ninette grabs her fingers in her skull and holds out to Jo a chunk of her brain, which has become a jelly-like mass due to the disease, first liquefied and then thickened again, Jo thinks, she has already read about it, but she could never imagine. Now it’s in front of her, a syphilitic piece of brain, and Ninette lays her head back, brings her hand to her mouth and enjoys slurping up her own brain.’
From “The Inflamed”

It is a magical fusion story in which at a certain point you no longer know where Jo ends and where you begin. It is a gigantic pot of emotions that Simone has stirred up here, she mixes generations of women’s souls in it, it is kitschy, hopelessly romantic, sad and scary, makes you cry and beautiful again, a vortex into which you are sucked from the first moment. sentence that you can’t figure out until you spit out the last sentence after being crushed in the deepest bowels of this novel.

And in all this crushing, what ultimately remains is the small, warm feeling that this story is finally out in the world. And that it was told more correctly and roundly. Which in the end almost always means that a woman had to be dug up somewhere. In this case yes. Because without Jo there would be no Van Gogh.

And without Simone Meier there would be no ‘inflamed people’. So let yourself be ignited by this wonderful necessity, call it fire, call it art, call it feminist reconquista, call it a family novel with an unfavorable father figure, call it whatever you want, but read the story. Let yourself be crushed. And tells about it.

Makes them immortal.

PS: Simone, I am bursting with pride. You managed to. <3