Reading and Discussion
Saturday, October 28, 2017, 3:00 pm: Brown University, Kassar-House Foxboro Auditorium, 151 Thayer St., Providence
Monday, October 30, 2017, 4:00–6:00 pm: University of Massachusetts, Herter Hall 301, 161 Presidents Dr., Amherst
A raft with eleven Algerian refugees, running low on fuel. A cruise ship with a small town’s worth of international passengers and crew members. An Irish freighter. A Spanish rescue vessel. One single point of convergence in a vast wash of blue water.
Miami-based
The Spirit of Europe, the third largest cruise liner in the world, plows through the Mediterranean every summer, offering its passengers a temporary escape from their everyday lives. But even the bloated tackiness of the ship’s much-hyped belly flop competition is not immune to the chaos of the European migration crisis. When a disabled raft nears
The Spirit of Europe, the ship’s captain is forced to do something headquarters in Miami wants to avoid: cut the engines.
The book received the Radio Bremen Crime Novel Award 2015 and the German Crime Novel Award 2016.
Kröger:
Reality is much more dramatic, violent and incomprehensible than fiction. I decided to take the encounter between the ships as the cause to freeze time, to create a 3-D model from this situation which I can observe from all perspectives. In this kind of model space I now step into each character's role and try to let him or her think and act on the basis of their individual biographies.
Merle Kröger © Ralf Sudbrak
Merle Kröger is co-author and producer of the award-winning cinema documentaries
Day of the Sparrow (2010) and
Revision (2012). Since 2003, Kröger has published four novels, which combine documentary research, personal history and political analysis with elements of crime literature. For "Grenzfall" (2012) and "Havarie" ("Collision") (2015), she received the German Crime Novel Award and the book is a bestseller in Germany. "Collision" will be published in the US by Unnamed Press in November 2017.
Back
