Language – courage – magic: speeches against idleness, both delivered and undelivered.

MEIN UNGLÜCK BEGINNT DAMIT, DASS DER STROMKREIS ALS RECHTECK ABGEBILDET WIRD
(My Unhappiness Starts With the Fact that Electric Circuits Are Depicted As Rectangles)
by Saša Stanišić
Luchterhand/PRH Germany, October 2025

There’s nothing for it: we have to do something to counter hardship and human suffering, war, poverty, fascism and the rest of it. Each of us can do their bit. Everyone. Donate stuff, help out somewhere, that sort of thing. Take responsibility. If the world’s going down the drain, we might as well go down with dignity, goddamn it.

Hardly anyone takes literature seriously any more, and not just since mobile phones . Still, here you are holding a book in your hand and wondering whether to buy it. There are speeches in it. Which you think is stupid. Speeches are something you make, that’s all.

I get it. But anyway, here’s a list of what you’d miss out on:

• The word « unlikely », about twenty times
• my great uncle Stevo, who got six numbers right in the lottery in the late 1990s and promptly drowned (along with a trumpet player)
• a chair in a back yard
• language, courage, magic
• the sentence « Doing is the opposite of death »

Saša Stanišić, born in Višegrad in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1978, has lived in Germany since 1992. His novels and stories have been translated into more than 30 languages, and have won numerous awards, including the 2019 German Book Prize (for Herkunft) and the 2014 Leipzig Book Fair Prize (for Vor dem Fest), as well as the Eichendorff Book Prize, Schiller Prize and Hans Fallada Prize. He lives in Hamburg.