Last year, I reread Stefanie Zweig's Nirgendwo in Afrika ("Nowhere in Africa", also adapted to an Oscar-winning film, although as far as I know it's not very faithful to the novel - I haven't watched it so far, so cannot say). I had first read it as a teenager and had not enjoyed it at all, but I think I simply wasn't ready for that kind of writing at the time. This time, I fell in love with Zweig's beautiful prose and her way of characterizing her protagonists.
Ein Mundvoll Erde is a very similar story, but written for teenagers. It was Zweig's very first novel set in Kenya, and after its success, she gained the courage to write about her experiences for an adult audience as well.
The titles translates as A mouth full of earth and relates to a pledge young Vivian performs with her Kikuyu friend Jogona: They are friends. This friendship is central to the story told in this novel - apart from that, the key elements are the same as in Nowhere in Africa: Vivian and her father, who are Jewish, have fled Nazi Germany to Kenya where they live on a farm. Vivian's father, a lawyer, works as a farm manager without having any knowledge of farming. While he is homesick, worries for the safety of his family and cannot feel at home in Kenya, missing his old life every day, Vivian has almost no memory of life in Germany and even hates the topic because it makes her father sad. She speaks Swahili and Kikuyu, loves the landscape and wilderness of the farm, and, spending most of her time with Kikuyu children and the people working on the farm, she soon speaks and thinks like them. While her father is helpless like a child, she navigates both cultures with ease and often feels much closer to the staff than to her father.
This situation, based on Stefanie Zweig's own childhood, is the same as the one in Nowhere in Africa, the only exception is the role of the mother, who is absent in Ein Mundvoll Erde.
This novel covers several years and concentrates mostly, but not exclusively, on Vivian's and Jogona's friendship over the years. In the beginning I was a bit disappointed because it was a little too fragmented, with lots of very short episodes, feeling a bit jumpy. In the second half, though, Zweig really finds her voice, the text becomes very consistent, and the language is exceptional in depicting Vivian's thoughts and feelings - thinking and feeling like an African girl who is at home on the farm and doesn't want to leave for a country that is foreign to her and that she doesn't remember. This exile in Kenya doesn't feel like an exile to her - it is all she has ever known, it's her life.
While this story is not as deep and grand as Nowhere in Africa, I'm still not sure if it would really work for teenagers, especially nowadays, forty years after it was originally published. Apart from that, it was again a story that gripped me and touched me, and made me reflect on the topic of home and what home is to different people. ( )