From Mondscheintarif to Neuland - The Writer Ildiko von Kürthy
She is the queen of the German women's novel: Ildikó of Kürthy. The heroines of her novels are humorous young modern women who describe their own weaknesses with humour and self-irony and who review their men's troubles together. Her books were translated into 30 languages worldwide. The bestselling author has now published her latest book "Neuland".
The language is her medium. The 48-year-old writer shows this immediately. Already as a child, she had to deal in detail with the language. Her father was blind. Therefore, it was clear that she had to explain everything in detail what was happening around her. Thus, making her father eyes did not happen. Today she says things such as: "I stick to it, that I'm more interested in my thighs than in world politics." - And so many women love her for this kind of phrases.
Ildikó of Kürthy´s heroines, the first-person narrators of her books, are always accompanied by a permanent feeling of inadequacy while exaggerated perception of one's self. In her first novel, "Mondscheintarif" from 1999, there was this sentence: "Something goes fundamentally wrong in my life." This sentence is the slogan and the motor of Kürthy´s telling. She applies the recurring pattern in her novels: Women in the early thirties are on their wordy driven search for the right man. "Freizeichen", "Herzsprung", “Blue Wonder"," “Höhenrausch" or "Schwerelos" - her novels top the bestseller lists for years. The secret is probably that the novels bundle scattered topic of women's magazines in a story. The continuous focus here is on one's own body. Her descriptions as spontaneous experience protocols are grasped right out of life. A recipe for success that concedes a point to the writer. Overall, so far she published eight books. The editions amount to more than six million.
For her latest work "Neuland – wie ich mich selber suchte und jemand ganz anderen fand", the author herself has gone in some sort of metamorphosis. The work has become an amusing, self-ironic crash course in self-optimization. The author has gone "in search of a better life” for one year. And she did all the things that a middle-aged woman would do in her desire for internal and external changes: Visiting awareness seminars, type change in form of hair extensions, flash and away freezing of thigh fat, silent days in a monastery, detox treatments in Bavaria, abdication of alcohol and white sugar. Her conclusion: "The unhappy woman over forty is a ticking time bomb." Moreover, after her year of self-optimization Ildikó of Kürthy shared a wise sentence: "My father was blind. You are never an eyecatcher for a blind man. For me, language became my feature of beauty."
