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“We have Siegfried Lenz to thank for a poetic book – perhaps his most beautiful.” Marcel Reich-Ranicki A warm summer on the Baltic many years ago. Benny Goodmann and Ray Charles are still in fashion, the hurdy-gurdy man is playing in the alleys, the currency is in marks and when the English mistress comes into the Upper Sixth classroom the pupils all stand up and say: “Good morning, Mrs. Petersen.” How Stella und Christian fall in love, how their passion has to face up to reality and how it is suddenly all over – and yet it isn’t. How it is actually through death that love gains immortality. Siegfried Lenz tells this story with a consummate power to empathize, detachment and humour. In the theme of the transitoriness, the temporary nature of earthly love, the impossibility of finding complete happiness, there resonates the melancholy of a Theodor Storm. In the sparseness of the narrative one detects the existential stringency of an Ernest Hemingway. And yet it is the charm and integrity of Siegfried Lenz the story-teller which speaks to us here, unfolding within the confines of a novella an eternally valid problem for humankind. Rights sold to: Denmark (Hovedland), Norway (Aschehoug), Italy (Neri Pozza), Taiwan (Yuan-Liou), Israel (Kinneret-Zmora-Dvir), Iceland (Aeskan), Korea (Sakyejul), France (Robert Laffont), Spain (Maeva), Hungary (Európa), USA/Canada (Other Press), China (Thinkingdom), UK (Haus Publishing), Brazil (Rocco), Romania (RAO), Bulgaria (Lettera), Albania (Dituria), Russia (Fluid), Greece (Patakis), Estonia (Olion), Sweden (Thorén och Lindskog), Japan (Shinchosha), Lithuania (Gimtasis Zodis), Vietnam (Phu Nu) and Netherlands (Van Gennep) Bestseller: 500.000 copies sold in Germany!
About the author:
Siegfried Lenz, born in Lyck in East Prussia in 1926, is one of the most important and widely-read writers in post-war and present-day literature. His works have been published since 1951 (“There were Hawks in the Air”; “Es waren Habichte in der Luft”) by Hoffmann und Campe and awarded numerous prizes, including the Goethe Prize from the city of Frankfurt-am-Main and the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers. Recently, on the occasion of his 80th birthday, Lenz’s collected short stories appeared in one volume Short Stories (Die Erzählungen) and a collection of his autobiographical essays Transposing Myself (Selbstversetzung). |
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