LiteraturSchweiz

Reading tip

Rolf Lappert, Über den Winter: Lennard Salm, the protagonist of the new Rolf Lappert novel is a conceptual artist and committed social critic. He is searching the shoreline for washed-up objects when he makes a gruesome discovery. Tied to a boat is a dead child, the daughter of refugees who did not survive the crossing. This throws Salm into an existential crisis. Just then he hears his older sister has died and returns to wintry Hamburg, where he sees his family at the funeral. His father has become frail and blind, his younger sister Bille loses her job as an assistant producer and his younger brother Paul is ambitious but pallid and lacking in character. His emotionally-cold mother, who Salm privately calls the 'Norwegian queen', is deliberately avoiding him. Rolf Lappert's «Künstlerroman» paints a portrait of a crisis of identity and meaning, revealing Salm's domestic background and biography, which is shaped by unspoken recriminations and mutual accusations. The novel takes place in a wintry Germany that makes the coldness that characterizes this mother-son relationship almost physically palpable. In «Über den Winter», Rolf Lappert surprises readers with strong imagery and an eloquence that gets under the skin. A well-made novel (Rudolf Probst, trans. by Andrea Willfratt)