Ulrike Draesner

He is the only person she has ever seen as a number: a five. She is an astrophysicist and is completely at home with numbers. He is a Protestant minister in Berlin, married with one son, and finds arithmetic heavy going. Her name is Harriet Saramandipur but in spite of that, she is a real German, even blond. Her father, an Indian, her guide to the world of numbers, has absconded. Very clerically, the churchman’s name is Peter Olvaeus and he barges back into her life after more than twenty years. (…) Over a period of a year, the cool calculator submits to the confusion of her feelings that she calls “earthly frailty”, and Peter, with his dark brown curly hair, an asthmatic twenty years her senior, turns grey. And the five? As a primary number, it represents vanity and openness. Although it cannot be denied that the novel is just a touch theoretical, Vorliebe is a story that is physical, whether the subject is an aptitude test for astronauts, an anti-smoking therapy or sex.

Daniela Strigl: „Übrig ist nur die Luft“
© Literaturen, March/April 2010