Despite the fact that Änderungsschneiderei Los Milagros („Alterations Shop, Los Milagros“) (S. Fischer) is a very international book, it would be hard to find a publication more difficult to convey to an English-speaking audience. Its author, María Cecilia Barbetta, learned German in Argentina, where she was born, and started writing in the language after moving to Berlin in 1996. This, her first novel, doesn’t fool around with any of the obvious observations that nonnative speakers usually make about the German language. Still, one continually asks oneself what one has got oneself into: which world, which language, and above all which mode between seriousness and play, euphoria and irony.
Barbetta tells of industrious girls and women in an alterations shop in her hometown, Buenos Aires. Her tone brings to mind that of moralizing romance novels written for young German ladies between 1920 and 1960. There is a lot of old-timey onomatopoeia (“Husch – husch!” : “shoo – shoo!”), and people have drily upbeat nicknames. On another level, however, Barbetta takes an indulgent pleasure in the ugly and offbeat idioms of current colloquial German, with its anglicisms and emphatic exclamations like “Hundert Pro!” (from the German for “hundred percent!” – roughly equivalent to “right on!”). The combination of this present-day vernacular and the timeless nineteenth century with its bridal dresses and girls’ dreams would already be a crazy mixture even if Barbetta hadn’t also added a profusion of specialized discourses that have become dear to her, as well as obscurities from remote corners of the German language: entomology, the nuances of cosmetic and textile colors, the slang of cheeky young men, the worlds of Lewis Carroll and Jefferson Airplane. On top of all this, the book is filled with images: Transit tickets, photos of Hans Bellmer objects, and pages from Wonder Woman comics and other books ornament the ends of the chapters. The text itself is interspersed with small vignettes that defy interpretation. Likewise, the typography sometimes leads an eventful life of its own, as if Mallarmé and Mark Z. Danielewski had joined forces. But all this doesn’t end in chaos: The women’s nerdiness about the textile trade and the obsessive-compulsive use of onomatopoeia suffice to give the book structure.
It wouldn’t be completely wrong, in fact, to say that this novel aims at the exact middle of a continuum between Johanna Spyri’s Heidi and Walter Abish’s How German Is It using the tried and tested means of Argentine philology and scholarship of the Borges-Cortázar tradition. The only thing that’s missing is any of the laboriousness and calculation that would be at the heart of such a postmodern monster. Even so, a (foreign) language is here not used as a transparent means of communication but instead distanced and staged as an object: We are on the common ground of poststructural theory and high-modernist prose. But the prefeminist theories and practices of femininity that cheerily breeze through this love story impart something that goes beyond the humorous observation of a remote tongue. They tell of the exactitude of what one makes oneself, or rather what one cobbles together for oneself – the precision that comes from well-protected obstinacy.