Anna Mitgutsch

Life is simply too short, and death is always untimely. They had been together for 35 years, twenty of them married, but it was only since living apart, in different continents, that the mutual attraction grew again in Jerome, the American attorney with Jewish roots, and in the nameless first-person narrator, a writer from Europe. (…) The divorcees imagine a future together in which they are hoping to catch up on what they once promised one another and have so long failed to do. Yet the narrator has only just returned to Europe to move in with Jerome for good when she receives a call saying that the beloved, deserted and rediscovered man is dead, felled by a heart attack. (…) Here, an author is writing at the pinnacle of her ability, able to draw on her life experience without remaining autobiographically dependent on it, equipped with a language that is capable of both atmospherically dense and discursively lucid passages, intimate moods and intellectual excursions. Wenn du wiederkommst touches your heart and gives you food for thought. It is an opportunity for readers both to feel and to think.

Karl-Markus Gauss: „ Einen Herzschlag entfernt vom Glück“
© Süddeutsche Zeitung, 24 June 2010