The police officer at the station does not look up from the computer screen when he asks Jella his question: “Can you tell me step by step what happened?” Jella Novak. Domestic violence. That’s how he had categorized her, and now she sits there to report her boyfriend – ex-boyfriend – Yannick, the strangulation marks still on her neck. It takes many attempts before she can utter it. She has swallowed too much. Repressed too many memories, downplayed events. But how did it come to this? What was before Yannick and, above all, who was there? Which men brought her here – and what kind of socialization?
But you’re not going to make a drama out of this, are you?
With one stroke, Jella's life falls apart. She returns to her old childhood room to a loving but equally reticent father. She ignores the calls from her mother in Berlin and the worried messages in the WhatsApp group with her university friends. “1. Buy panty liners + buy pads, 2. Get life in order, (3. Yannik?)” – this is the timid attempt to sort her life with to-do lists. A life as a woman, the painful side of which showed itself much earlier than with the toxic relationship with Yannick. Through flashbacks, Ruth-Maria Thomas tells us about Jella's youth in the 2000s. About how she and her best friend Shelly devised the “Project Hotness,” which aimed solely to please men. How she dated Tom, who wanted girls with small hands and feet, who only liked her made up, at most tipsy, not drunk. Who demanded that she swallow his sperm. How she was eventually raped by her buddy in the tenth grade. Because he did not accept her no. “Really? I thought that was part of foreplay. You should have pushed back harder. He winks at me. You ... you’re not going to make a drama out of this, are you?”
Human Brutality and Linguistic Refinement
With her debut novel, Thomas holds nothing back: Not from the unvarnished truth of pure psychological and physical violence, whose human brutality is reflected in every word (“He pushed his penis deep inside me, pulled it out again, and again, and again, first slowly, then faster. It hurt so much that it brought tears to my eyes”). Nor does the author shy away from breaking literary conventions; instead, she plays with language and form. That this courage is recognized is evident from the nomination of the novel to the longlist of the German Book Prize. And indeed, Thomas's literary technique is sophisticated: By doing without quotation marks throughout the novel, incorporating interrupted thoughts, short sentences, and indented streams of consciousness, the author breaks down grammatical distance and catapults us in a remarkable way directly into Jella's head. Despite the reduced punctuation, it is always clear who is speaking and to whom. An aesthetic trick that allows us to organically become part of Jella's inner life.
"The most beautiful version" tells of a woman whose youth was shaped by media beauty ideals and the male gaze. Who falls in love with a refined artist as a young adult. Whose relationship brings forth not only his but also her most toxic sides. Her anger, her violence. And with this, Thomas tells the stories of an entire generation of women in a patriarchal society. Women who, with smudged eyeliner, too-tight mini skirts, suppressed tears, and swallowed pain, are made into the most transcendent version of themselves.
"The most beautiful version" | 2024 | Rowohlt Buchverlag | 272 pages
