"A stroke of luck for German literature." Frankfurter Rundschau
Abel Nema can no longer recall when and why his life changed so much that nothing and nobody is in the right place any more – including himself. Has he never got over his father’s disappearance, or over the fact that his friend Elija was shocked when he told him he loved him, and that he could no longer return to his homeland because he was regarded as a deserter there? Abel would love above all to erase all memories from his head, and he would certainly not mind in the slightest if nothing but the faintest traces of his marriage remained there, although Mercedes loves him and he feels attached to their son…
Terézia Mora’s debut novel is constructed as a prose labyrinth of rare linguistic force and uses a carefully chosen wealth of images unparallelled in contemporary German-speaking literature. She tells the story of a man torn from his roots, a man wordless, a man who, although he can speak ten languages, has forfeited the ability to communicate in his own. The novel opens with Abel Nema dangling upside down from a swing, his feet bound, gaining the distorted view of the world that he will retain throughout the whole of his hellish journey through our present reality.
A work of real linguistic art, which moves at the very highest literary level and with great poetic tautness – but which also contrives to be an exciting read.