Michael Stavaric: Fremdes Licht.

Strange Light.
Novel.
Munich: Luchterhand, 2020.
512 p.; EUR 22,70 (A).
ISBN: 978-3-630-87551-4.

In Strange Light, Michael Stavaric takes us into different worlds: Into the vastness of space and a distant future, into the Inuit habitat and onto the site of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the so-called White City.

The novel revolves around the stories of two women: Elaine und Uki. We see the first part of the story, Winterthur and the End of the World, through Elaine’s eyes. Since a comet has destroyed the earth, she’s on a flying ship – a kind of modern ark. On board are (randomly) selected travelers, a variety of plant genetic material and data, living organisms, and food staples, as well as the sarcophagi. That is what the sleeping cocoons are called, which put their users into a cold sleep so they don’t age during the odyssey lasting several decades.

Before the catastrophe, Elaine Duval, born in 2345, was a geneticist involved in developing a cloning program. But she had always longed for a secluded world. In this she took after her grandfather who moved to Greenland when she was a child. It was where his mother and all their ancestors had once lived. They were Tunumiit, East Greenlanders who prescribed to a very traditional way of life.

This ties into the story of Elaine’s ancestor Uki, told in the second half of the book Greenland and the White City. As a young woman, Uki came into contact with a new world through the explorer Fridtjof Nansen; his wife Elaine was the spitting image of Uki. Stavaric succeeds in fictionalizing the historical polar explorer and Nobel Prize winner so that he smoothly fits into the story. Finally, the Greenlander Uki set off with Nansen’s team for New York, and then further – to the white city.

Strange Light is not only the title of the novel, but also the book’s defining motif. In Elaine’s dystopian future, light is exclusively artificial, destructive and dangerous. In contrast, Uki’s life is saturated by the flickering of the qulliq – an oil flame in a soapstone bowl.

Michael Stavaric is a master of storytelling. Relating encounters of reality and fiction, optimism and melancholy, life and death. We long for the Inuit’s closeness to nature, are horrified at future inventions and, after reading this novel, we perceive our environment much more consciously. The familiar abruptly becomes foreign, encourages us to think and explore further.

Short version of the review by Erkan Osmanovic, 29 February 2020.
Translation by Ida Cerne.

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