A family of three - father, mother, child - return from Switzerland to a village in the Sächsische Schweiz/Saxon Switzerland, the home of the father. He will revisit the places of his childhood, through traumatic personal and historic episodes. The debut novel of the poet Thilo Krause - currently based in Switzerland and originary from this part of Germany - is built around a relatively simple idea.
What makes this book special is the poetic intertwinning of the memory reverberations. The search for the past, as inaccurate as it may be, sounds like a desperate musical score made up of flashes of memories. Those flashes reproduce the normal chaos of the ways in which memory is built, and the desperate search of the main characters to reassess his past reproduces the shock that we may be faced with when we try to build up a narrative based on fragments of memory. Which is an approximation dictated by the memory itself but we are sometimes desperate to know/remember the ´truth´.
Elbwärts is evocative and tragic, as tragic of the fate of the one-foot Vito, but it does use a very innovative memory exploration technique. It may not be the kind of novels matching my enthusiasm, but from the point of view of the evolution of the contemporary German-speaking literature it plays an important unique role.
Rating: 3 stars
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