A Literary Dissection of Grief
Reviewed:
by Michael Lentz
Translated by Max Lawton
isolarii, 156 pp., $15.00 (Subscription)
Publication Date: 11/1/25
To grieve is to enter a woeful emotional state, sinking into an abyss far beyond the consoling bounds of language. Witnessing the death of a loved one is not merely another life event or a painful moment easily wiped from memory. For many, it’s a permanent wound that, once open, resists all stitches—an ache that slowly becomes manageable but never ceases to remind you of its existence. While mourning the death of his mother, German author Michael Lentz, known for his encyclopedic novel Schattenfroh, performs a surgical dissection of his anguish in Motherdying. Appearing for the first time in English, his award-winning novella is a discursive dialectic chronicling his mother’s passing, stretching language and literary form to the indescribable state of grief.
Written in a stream of fragmented prose, Lentz begins by assessing memory’s role within grief before flowing into a sequence of interconnected elements related to death. Each blunt sentence cuts like a knife through morbid subject matter, depicting the slow, continuous deterioration of his mother—both mentally and physically. Lentz cites consequential moments with precision: “Mother vanished on the twentieth of August, nineteenninetyeight, at around elevenfifty,” his word choice making it clear that death is not an isolated moment in time; rather, it’s a painstaking, tortured process.
Death unavoidably takes a toll on both the ailing party and those there to bear witness. Family members are cycled through during appointments and dismal visitations, only to find themselves helplessly watching their loved one decay piece by piece. Lentz steps beyond the adage that there are no words to express pain and instead experiments with form in order to capture the omnipresence of agony. Memories, emotions, and visual sensations come all at once, eclipsing words, time, and rationality. In his eyes, there is no sense to be made out of sickness and death—just acceptance of the inevitable.
Perhaps the most dehumanizing aspect of death is the loss of personhood. As if their identities were erased, those fatally ill become shells of themselves and strangers to their loved ones, as Lentz articulates:
“Now that she’s dead, she’s a stranger. How is it that when someone dies, they become a stranger.”
Lentz labels this methodical erosion as a “sickness of consciousness”, suggesting that the deterioration of the body is merely an external representation of a deeper rooted process of decay.
Skillfully carried into English by Max Lawton, Motherdying presents readers with a riddle rather than an answer. The fragmented novella ranges from aphoristic language to the stunted thoughts of the author, which reflect his mourning and disorientation. Instead of attempting to express the inexpressible, Lentz crafts an autobiographical memoir that pushes the limits of language, embodying the conscious state of grief.
