All guests of the European Literature Days from 2009 to 2014.

[ book tip by Claudia Gremler ] Aris Fioretos' fascinating novel Stockholm Noir – a much more fitting title for this tale of strange encounters and wrong perceptions than the German Die Seelensucherin (The Soul Seeker) – grips the reader from the start and despite a few pseudo-scientific digressions remains unputdownable until the last page. The book’s omniscient narrator with his playful attitude freely moves between the different narrative strands, going backward and forward in time, always slightly confusing the reader and effectively creating a narrative structure not unlike the urban labyrinth of Berlin and Stockholm, the two cities which form the backdrop for this unusual story.

Set in the mid 1920s, Stockholm Noir follows a young woman with the telling name Vera Grund as she tries to uncover the truth of her ancestry and get to the bottom ('Grund') of her father’s strange fate. Unexpectedly abandoned by her lover, a flirtatious poet, she leaves Berlin and travels to Stockholm where she hopes to meet her father and solve the mysteries of her childhood. Plagued by migraines, besieged by the unfamiliar icy climate and (sometimes unsuccessfully) trying to communicate in this alien environment Vera struggles to make sense of her discoveries and to put her relationship with Sasha to rest. In Fioretos' clear yet suggestive and nearly mesmerising writing, Stockholm in the snow becomes a foreign cityscape with a life of its own and is portrayed as an enigmatic place that puzzles Vera and provides answers when and where they are least expected.

[ Favourite quote ] 'War man nur stark genug, konnte man eine andere Geschichte bekommen.'

[ book info ] Fioretos, Aris: Die Seelensucherin. (original language: Swedish (German)) DuMont, Köln, 2000 (2000). ISBN: 3-8321-5352-7 .