Moderator: Daniel Bowles, Professor of German, Boston College
Are you allowed to write a book in a language you are not fully in command of? Turns out, yes- and you can even win a major literary award for it. Israel-born author Tomer Gardi wrote
And Nothing Ever Ends in broken German and has just been awarded the 2022 Leipzig Book Fair Prize.
In the book, two artists from two different centuries travel through linguistic and cultural spaces. Experiences of foreignness, identity, life as an artist, and lots of politics are the major themes of the novel, in which the two storylines mirror each other.
First, Tomer Gardi, written in German, sends himself as a literary character with the talking German shepherd Rex and the elf king or even Goethe’s Erlkönig at his side on a fantastic-adventurous odyssey, slapstick, funny and with many subliminal pinpricks.
In the second part of the novel, translated from Hebrew, we follow the 19th century Indonesian painter Raden Saleh from Java through Europe and back to Asia—a historical novel and at the same time a reflection of our times.
Tomer Gardi, born in 1974 in Kibbuz Dan in Galilee, studied literature in Tel Aviv and Berlin.
Broken German is Tomer Gardi’s first novel written in German.
Otherwise You’ll Get Your Money Back is his second novel, published in 2019. His novel
And Nothing Ever Ends has been awarded the 2022 Leipzig Book Fair Prize in fiction. He lives in Berlin.
Daniel Bowles is an assistant professor of German Studies at Boston College and a literary translator. His current work concerns contemporary literature and new forms of the fantastic. He has published translations of novels by Thomas Meinecke and Christian Kracht.
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