International online book club: meet the author
What could be nicer than reading a good book? We have an idea: Read together!
Like-minded people from various Northern European countries meet in the new digital book club of the Goethe-Institut to read German-language literature together and share their reading experience and perspectives. The special thing about it: The authors are there live, reading from their books and discussing with us.
At our third international meeting on October 29th, we invited the filmmaker and writer Lola Randl to read her book The Great Garden with us.
THE BIG GARDEN
"An instinct is perceived as an irresistible urge. Plants and animals do not even think about opposing this instinct, whereas humans postpone or transform their instincts more and more frequently." A novel about the difficulty of escaping the abundance of modern life in the country and growing your vegetables in peace. And when the mother, a lover, an analyst and voles join the husband and children in the garden, even the therapist from the city doesn't know what to do next. One day the filmmaker Lola Randl decides to turn her back on city life in Berlin and calmly cultivate a garden. In the heart of the Uckermark, the least populated area of Western Europe, she deals with sowing times and soil qualities, pests and weeds, pruning and storage techniques. But turning to nature and a simple, uncomplicated life does not really succeed: the husband is joined by the lover, and when the relationship with her analyst becomes too close, he is replaced by a therapist. While Randl brings the city to the countryside and understands that you can't run away from yourself, the garden begins to bloom just as colorfully as village life, enriched by cooking Japanese women, artists, utopians and all kinds of happiness seekers
LOLA RANDL
Lola Randl was born in Munich in 1980. She is a film director, screenwriter and writer. She made her feature film debut with the film
Die Besucherin.
Von Bienen und Blumen premiered in the
Neues Deutsches Kino series in July 2018 at the Munich Film Festival. The quirky documentary is playful about experimental village life in the Brandenburg Uckermark. In 2019 her first novel
The Big Garden was published, which made it onto the long list of the German Book Prize.
WHO CAN PARTICIPATE?
Everyone who wants to read and discover German-language literature, meet authors and share their reading experience with others. The book club takes place in German. All participants should have sufficient language skills to read and discuss in German. You can register by email here:
To Registration
For registration You will then receive a link to the online live session.
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
We use
Zoom for our meeting. We recommend using a headset as loudspeakers can create annoying echo effects. Participation is possible from PC and Mac. To participate, simply follow the link that we will send you after registration and register in the room with your name.
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