The Grief of the Tangent

What is the ground we walk on talking about? In Fabian Saul’s first, deeply human novel, certainties are shaken: a friend dies, a love falls apart. In a world where the stones speak of the past, the protagonist encounters his own feelings in the topography. Everything knows about transience – and knows everything about him.

In cinematic scenes of poetic power, shared cigarettes stand here like pictures next to the sunlight on a morning in Nida, the clear edges of Jean Genet's gravestone stand next to a demolished house in Linienstraße, Nina Simone’s last concert stands next to the songs from the wall. Every memory tells of the possibility of a different future: of traces of resistance to the violence of the one, grand narrative. Thus, with every moment, with every new image, something tender and new emerges, searching for a place of empathy and solidarity at the abyss of contact.

“The doctor lifts the blankets and breaks your dead bones until the whole room disappears under fine white dust. 'The poor devil', he says again and again and then enters your number on the death certificate. He hesitates briefly and checks the cause of death in a glossary in which the pages are slowly peeling away from the adhesive. You still had a cigarette and your mobile phone in your hand. Maybe you wanted to call someone.”