"A debut novel, and what a debut novel it is!" Julia Hubernagel, taz
"This book may be a debut; but it is no rushed, spur-of-the-moment thing. The novel is precise and poetic, sparkling with humor, and in all its wildness also a rigorous exercise. (...) Saiger's novel is remarkable." Sabine Peters, taz
“‘What You Don’t See’ also stands in the tradition of artworks that close themselves off, that place the topos of unrepresentability, of the limits of what can be depicted and symbolized, at their center. In this way, this debut also celebrates the unavailability, the enigma of art.” Beate Tröger, Deutschlandfunk
"Art, beauty, radical disappearance: Magdalena Saiger's debut novel explores such exit strategies with labyrinthine humor and a keen sense for the lunar landscapes of the present." Jutta Person, Philosophie Magazin
“An unusual debut novel… ‘What You Don’t See, or The Absolute Uselessness of the Moon’ is also a brief account of labyrinths and the nature of paper, of Theseus’s heroic deed and Ariadne’s desperate love. Last but not least, the novel reflects on beauty.” Katharina Bendixen, junge Welt
“Magdalena Saiger has endowed her protagonist with a language that is sometimes brutal and malicious, sometimes gentle and poetic, counteracting his search for purity with gentle irony. (…) Magdalena Saiger’s impressive novel artfully, yet also angrily and darkly, recounts how artists, representing humanity as a whole, have lost their connection to the ‘balance of the world’ and are no longer able to restore it – permanently.” Thomas Plaul, Lesart
"Magdalena Saiger is a magician. She enchants us with powerful imagery of the fragile beauty of a lost place ." Thomas Bleitner, Lüders Bookstore, Hamburg
"This extraordinary novel is a little intoxicating, a slow-acting thrill that then sharpens my perception." Anna Rahm – On the Road with Books, Ravensburg
"Magdalena Saiger makes her character speak with such anger and philosophical eloquence, with such intelligence and subtle wit, that it's almost impossible to resist her pull." From the jury's statement for the 2020 Hamburg Literature Prize
Winner of the 2020 Hamburger Literature Prize for Fiction
What you don’t see, an unnamed narrator describes to his audience in a text that “no one will ever read,” as the very first sentence states. He intends to build a paper labyrinth, a walk-in work of art, in an elusive location that he himself only painstakingly located using Google Maps, where the grid blurs. In this hinterland near the highway, he finds an abandoned warehouse that seems suitable for his project, and his planning begins to take shape. But one day, a second figure appears, whom the first names Giacometti. He comes from the village that was razed to make way for a coal mining area that was soon abandoned because it proved unproductive. Of all the inhabitants, Giacometti was the only one who refused to be relocated; he keeps the village within himself and all its stories, which he tells the artist at night, on the edge of the excavated pit: “We are indistinguishable, two points in space, two lonely beings alienated from the world, two satellites orbiting their own black holes, unreachable.”
Magdalena Saiger lets her character speak with such fury and philosophical insight, so cleverly and yet subtly wittily, that it is almost impossible to resist her pull. As readers, we have no choice but to follow the characters into the labyrinth. Whatever may await us there—in any case, this novel reveals a magnificent writer.
How overused words are. I write awakening, and you think of Saul on the dusty road to Damascus; I write miraculous stag, and you think of Jägermeister and folklore in thick wall frames; I write tribal leader, and you immediately become nationalistic; I write grace, and you think of the librarian’s doe-like eyes; I write life-changing, and you have calendar sayings, self-help books, and experiences to go with it; I write beauty, and that’s where it gets worst.
I write: It was simply a stag.
And: I saw it.
Through and through.