"Peter Wawerzinek transforms his life into great art." - NDR Kultur
A Spring in Rome, Peter Wawerzinek is a resident fellow at Villa Massimo. He roams the city, gathering inspiration for his new novel. A wealth of impressions presents itself to him—beauty, chaos, a vibrant liveliness: promises for the time ahead. But then the stay is overshadowed: the pandemic puts an end to his walks, technology fails, and all the texts he had produced are lost. Peter Wawerzinek moves to Trastevere and decides to write about Pasolini. Yet something still doesn’t feel right: cold, white fingertips in the most beautiful spring sun. It is his body that no longer seems to fit the picture. A visit to his doctor in Berlin finally brings the diagnosis: it is cancer. But even the confrontation with death does not make him give up. He is drawn back to Rome, to the intensity of the eternal city—and the beginning of the journey back to life.
Peter Wawerzinek writes about human transience, the immediate threat of death—yet every single line of his novel bursts with intensity. In literature, music, art—but above all in love, which he encounters by chance, at exactly the right moment—he finds the strength to heal.