Rowohlt

Lina Wolff | Der Teufelsgriff | Rowohlt | 256 pages | 25 EUR

The first sentences of the novel sound almost banal. On the strength of her savings, a Swedish woman leaves her emotionally and climatically chilly homeland to lead a nice life in the sunny south. Specifically, in Florence, Italy. When you think of the popular Mediterranean boot, what springs to mind isn't just sun, art, wine and the best cuisine in the world. There's also, of course, joie de vivre, sweeping passions and feelings - in short: "Amore". Will this be a trivial love story? A cool, blond Swede falls in love with a hot-blooded Italian who introduces her to the art of living and enjoying life?

If you're not in the mood for shallow entertainment, you should spontaneously mentally skim through your address book. Do I have a friend or acquaintance who might enjoy a book like this? If not, it will end up unread in the waste paper bin, from where it will find its way to the ecologically correct recycling cycle.

However, part of author Lina Wolff's literary mastery is her ability to fashion convincing clichés and let them shine through: That's not the whole story. There's more to come. Just a few pages later, the love story turns into a toxic relationship with brutal domestic violence. Then into an affair with a shady American, a drama of jealousy, a side story with couples therapy. Next, a brave attempt by the woman to emancipate herself, at least professionally. Then: a headlong flight to New Orleans. In the picturesque city on the Mississippi River, a new doomed relationship, with even more intense jealousy, and a psychological thriller, including kidnapping and captivity, until the unbelievable, bloody rescue - by no other than the Italian from Florence, summoned to help.

Can a toxic relationship between an abusive narcissist and his loyal victim ever become a harmonious or at least non-violent relationship? 
The woman makes attempt after attempt to forgive, offers of reconciliation which the man accepts with gratitude and relief. All of them are ultimately just brief respites before his next violent outburst.

The man's physical assaults are only ever hinted at. The emphasis is on the woman's thoughts and feelings, which revolve around how she is to blame for his violent outbursts. Yes, even how she of all people could "save" the aggressor and lead her supposed "love" out of the fatal swinging between violence, reconciliation, passion, pain and "happiness".

If you listen to and read the inflationary, feminist pronouncements on the subject, such blatant cases of domestic violence are only the rare exceptions. But the reality doesn't seem to care about politically correct articles or "woke" campaigns. According to statistics, one in every three women is affected by sexual and/or physical violence. A quarter of all women experience physical and/or sexual violence in their relationship. Two out of three women are victims of sexual harassment. These shocking figures do not come from the dark past, nor from Muslim countries that European activists love to point accusing fingers at, but from - Europe. The continent of enlightenment, humanism and universal human rights.

Fortunately, The Devil's Grip is not an "activist" text that aims to outrage, shake up or accuse. Although, of course, it does that anyway. Instead, it is a story about a toxic relationship, told with such laconicism and precision that it is all the more gripping: paradoxical forces of attraction between perpetrator and victim, in this case an abusive man, prisoner of his own compulsive behaviour, and his female victim, who is attached to her tormentor even though she could leave him.

Since such fatal character constellations hardly ever develop harmoniously in reality, the novel doesn't end happily either. If it had, it wouldn't have taken its characters seriously.

After reading it, one feels - again paradoxically - deep horror at such a toxic relationship and great happiness at a masterfully written, psychological novel.