Our book club which is open and free to all literature friends will discuss (in German) the novel 'What you can see from here (Was man von hier aus sehen kann)' by Mariana Leky. Books are available to buy from the library beforehand.
Selma, an elderly resident of the Westerwald, can foresee death - someone in the village always dies the day after the okapi appears in her dreams. However, the dreams never reveal who is going to die. As you can imagine, the span of time between dream and death exists as a state of emergency for everybody in the village - and in her novel, Mariana Leky describes the fear of the local residents, what they blindly risk, admit, destroy, or bring into order. Yet that is not everything, by far.
What You Can See From Here is the portrait of a village and its residents. But above all it is a novel about love in the state of absence, as the various “objects of desire” have a strong tendency to withdraw (or at least, to not respond in a manner acceptable to the other individuals involved). As does incredibly handsome Frederik, Luise’s great love. Luise, Selma’s granddaughter, is the heroine and narrator of the novel.
Frederik decided to move to Japan and to live in a cloister as a Buddhist monk, returning to the village and Luise only for a few weeks every winter. Each time – winter after winter – Luise is hoping for him to stay for good. But words like “forever” are not frequently said in a place over which the Sword of Damocles is hovering in form of the okapi dream….
Mariana Leky
Mariana Leky was born in Cologne in 1973 and currently makes her home in Berlin. After training as a bookseller, she studied cultural journalism at the University of Hildesheim. DuMont Buchverlag published a set of short stories Liebesperlen /Pearls of Love (2001), as well as the novels Erste Hilfe/ First Aid (2004), Die Herrenausstatterin/The Gentlemen’s Tailor (2010), Bis der Arzt kommt/Until the Doctor Comes. Stories from the Office Hours (2013) and Was man von hier aus sehen kann / What We Can See From Here (2017). In 2000, she has won the Allegra Prize for her first set of short stories. She was honored with the Lower Saxony Literary Advancement Award and a grant from the State of Bavaria for her short story collection, Pearls of Love. In 2005, she was awarded the Advancement Prize for Young Artists, in the category Poetry/Writing, from the State of North Rhine-Westfalia for her novel First Aid.
Source (translated text): DuMont Publishers
Participation is free of charge. You can register via Eventbrite, but it is not essential to do so.
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