Some enjoy telling their stories, others prefer to listen. So can people, including writers, be divided into two distinct groups? Antje Rávik Strubel had long assumed she belonged to one group rather than the other - until she was told a story that seriously challenged her (self-)perception.
Saša Stanišić, Reykjavík How does the Arctic fox change its coat?
Over the last few years Saša Stanišić has played a story-telling game with his young son: the boy gives him three words, and he then makes a story out of them. All of the stories begin with him driving away in a taxi - and end with him happily coming back home again. While at the Literature Festival in Reykjavík he invented a story specially for us - using the words ‘fox’, ‘volcano’ and ‘T-shirt’.
Colm Tóibín wrote his most recent novel, The Magician, in Los Angeles. The book concerns Thomas Mann, who in the 1940s also lived in LA - in a house that was built to his own specification, and in which he wrote his novel Dr Faustus. Although the house was close by, Tóibín couldn’t visit it because of the pandemic, with the result that it remained a house of dreams full of inspiring treasures - though it did ultimately open its doors once again.
Los Angeles has become part of the author’s very being. The city is a living presence within her in many of her distinctly magical memories: journeys along empty streets, lemon blossom, the splendour of palm trees silhouetted against the night sky, the seasons so subtly differentiated that people who live in places with ‘proper’ seasons aren’t even aware of them. She carries LA with her wherever she goes, until finally she returns there.
Realization: Thomas Böhm (texts, editing and design), Dr. Anne-Bitt Gerecke, Martin Bach, Marie Kiewe, Miriam Spinrath (editing and design), Marcus Sporkmann (video editing) und Eliphas Nyamogo (editing)
