Incentives - Neue Literatur aus Österreich

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[ Buchtipp von Incentives ] Anna Kim’s second novel pulls us into the barbarian ways of the War in Yugoslawia. Luan Alushi, an Albanian from the Kosovo, is looking for his wife, Fahrie, who has been missing since the outbreak of the Kosovo conflict. Even the first pages of the book are of a biting intensity. Luan fills out a questionnaire, assisted by Nora, a worker in the Red Cross service to locate missing persons. 'The Ante Mortem Questionnaire: Twenty-two chapters that capture the characteristics of a missing person, features he or she had while alive, ante mortem, in order to succeed in the search by analyzing and comparing bones, pieces of bone, data post mortem. The findings are not the person but rather his or her remains.'
Luan is arrested in 'frozen time'. He wavers between his strong need to know and his horrible fear of the final and irrevocable knowledge of his wife’s fate. Nora, the first-person narrator, overcomes the distance to her 'client' that is actually required in her job, becomes interested in Luan’s story, and thus a tender, unusual and impossible love story starts to develop.
It is soothing that Kim has thoroughly researched her intense story; her narrative is knowledgeable, her novel built on a sound foundation. Die gefrorene Zeit is a book that makes you shiver about the brutality of human acts; it is due to Anna Kim’s skills that the reader is not left alone with all that pain and violence. Certainly one of this year’s most essential books.
Peter Landerl, October 2008, translated by Johanna Ellsworth.
Original longer version

[ Info ] Kim, Anna: Die gefrorene Zeit. (In Frozen Time). (original language: Deutsch) Literaturverlag Droschl, Wien / Graz, 2008 . ISBN: 978-3-85420-742-9.