"Maë's novel is about the journey of self- discovery in the world, a journey that repeatedly veers into the poetic." –Glamour, Katharina Walser
"On language and its painful limitations: The search for one's own body, one's own self, while growing up with autism." –Book Culture, Katia Schwingshandl
"Everything in between, and beyond is impressive. Through the simplicity of its narrative about extremely complicated things. Through the fearlessness with which new hurdles and handicaps are repeatedly overcome. And through the solidarity that the first-person narrator experiences from his family." –APA, Wolfgang Huber-Lang
"...This doesn't make first-person literature any less valuable, because it remains a parable, especially when it is as linguistically precise and laconic as in Maë Schwinghammer's debut novel." –The little queer review, Nora Eckert
"Everything in between, and beyond' is a tentatively tender story about its protagonist's breaking free and arriving. A searching text about little Michael from a working-class district in Vienna, bullied and misunderstood, about a teenager caught between fitness obsession and self-doubt, about gay love and transitions." –Kulturnews, Felix Eisenreich
"Maë Schwinghammer shows how one can 'grow out' of an unsuitable identity... And in the end, even this identity isn't set in stone, because-and this is the message that gives the novel a very warm and encouraging feeling (for me)- there is something beyond everything in between." –Literaturhaus Wien, Daniela Fürst
"In everything in between and beyond, a language is found, a physicality, an identity - this sensitive portrait of Schwinghammer is highly recommended!" –Reviewer's Son, Michaela Minder
On the Impossibility of Language
At first, the words are whole, they make sense, but as soon as they leave Michael’s mouth, they fall to the ground and shatter before they even reach other people’s ears, like small porcelain cups before his eyes. His mother translates between him and the world. She understands him. She’s the only one. «Babbling,» the playgroup teacher calls it. «Perceptual disorder,» the doctors call it. A few years later, the world has other words for Michael: computer brain, pussy, swing homo, teddy bear. Names, but not a single one that belongs to this self.
Michael
Michel
Mila
Mela
Mel
Mae
«A name taken from a name, taken from one language to find one.»
Impressively and poetically, Maë Schwinghammer writes of a search for understanding that culminates in a discovered self; she recounts growing up in the working class, of roots in Austria and Serbia; of the fluidity of gender, of sexuality, love, and friendship; of autism and the process of connecting with chosen and unchosen families. A painful yet healing novel. A debut that is both: the capturing of silence. Or perhaps: the omission of precisely that silence.