An impersonal room: fear and strageness in Carla Maliandi’s La habitación alemana

Abstract

The narrator and protagonist of La habitación alemana (2017) written by Carla Maliandi travels to the German city of Heidelberg with the purpose of moving away from the conflicts of her life in Buenos Aires. The choice of the city is not random: it is the place where she spent his first five years when his parents went into exile in the seventies. The narrative concentrates on that period of permanence in the city that constitutes a sort of escape, but also a return. An escape from the responsibilities and daily life that awaits in Buenos Aires, but also an impossible return to the space of the childhood. Displacement becomes a form of access to the understanding of an idealizing power associated with the city of its childhood memory. A «fairy tale» in the center of intimacy that becomes a fictional force to rethink the home and the self. The narrator will account for the strageness of others in a narrative passage that presents itself as a swing from fear to perplexity.