When the children have grown up, and the grandparents have become children again.
ROTKÄPPCHEN RAUCHT AUF DEM BALKON
(Red Riding Hood Is Smoking on the Balcony)
by Wladimir Kaminer
Goldmann/Verlagsgruppe Random House Bertelsmann, August 2020 (voir catalogue)
Children are odd. And so are grandparents. Children grow up, get a mortgage, and refuse to touch the cheap booze they used to binge-drink at parties – while their grandparents rediscover a childlike pleasure in conquering the world and pushing the boundaries. Meanwhile, the younger generation prefers to stay at home, and to ‘find’ itself by living between the fridge and the computer. In this new collection of stories, told with much love and humour, family man Wladimir Kaminer reveals the complicated relationship between the generations.
Wladimir Kaminer, born in Moscow in 1967, trained as a sound engineer for theatre and radio and then studied dramaturgy at the Moscow Theatre Institute. He has been living in Berlin since 1990. He is a regular contributor to various newspapers and magazines, and he organises events. His volume of short stories, Russendisko, and numerous other books have made him into one of the most popular and sought-after writers in Germany.
Paris, ca. 1850. Bed-ridden and terminally ill, Heinrich Heine wants to prise one final work from the jaws of death: His memoirs are to be his magnum opus. It’s been a long time since he last attended an illustrious bohemian dinner – instead, he receives occasional visits from German exiles and French artist friends. One day, Elise Krinitz seeks him out. The young woman admires Heine, and hopes to find in him a mentor for her own literary ambitions. He tenderly and ironically calls her ‘Mouche’, and they soon embark on a platonic, but nonetheless passionate affair. Yet when Heine dies on the 17th February 1856, his memoirs are lost forever. Steeped in the fascinating panorama of 1850s Paris, Boëtius’s novel is a unique portrait of the final years of the great German poet Heinrich Heine.
A return trip to the South Pole is an impossible dream for many of us – but the medic Carmen Possnig did just that. On behalf of the European Space Agency, she spent a year in the heart of the Antarctica to find out what it’s like to live in extreme weather conditions, with a distinct lower level of oxygen and in complete isolation from the rest of the world. With twelve other scientists, she spent the winter at the Concordia research station in the eternal ice. There, she not only encountered the breathtaking beauty of the most extreme continent on Earth, but also her own limits: Sharing a tight space with other people for twelve months, in a world that remains dark for months on end and where the temperature drops to -80°C, requires a huge physical and mental effort. Carmen Possnig’s personal and witty travel report, and its wealth of photographs, opens up a window onto an alien world – making us marvel at our planet’s diversity, and at how adaptable human nature can be.
During the final months of the Weimar Republic, a highly regarded doctor disappears. His sports car is found abandoned on the shores of a lake near Berlin. The homicide division investigates and discovers that the respectable medic’s carefully cultivated façade has been hiding a shady double life, whose trail leads from Berlin all the way to Barcelona. Oliver Hilmes has reconstructed this sensational and puzzling case from files discovered in Berlin’s regional archive. Enriched with fictional touches, Dr Mühe’s Disappearance is the gripping and ingenious story of the search for truth, and of the dark side of middle-class life on the eve of dictatorship.
When someone asks Mavie about her cool glow-in-the-dark tattoo at a party, she thinks they’re joking. But then she sees it herself, in the light on the dancefloor – and panics. How did the scorpion get on her skin? Mavie has no idea that the sign makes her the target of a sinister game. Meanwhile, detectives Inga Björk and Christian Brand are investigating the case of a jogger found brutally murdered in a forest. They don’t know that this is just the beginning of a sadistic series of murders – and that the only way they can stop it is by changing sides and joining in the deadly game …