The Yacht

Martha Oberon's midsummer night's dream is to last more than one night: The young draughtswoman from London wants to spend three months in the Italian town of N. to learn how to paint in oil at the Academy of Fine Arts. One evening she meets Salvatore Spinelli, an intangible air spirit and descendant of that marvellous family of good-for-nothings who know how to live and have a lot of time for reading and watching. He takes Martha on a trip to Sicily, where they both get caught up in the hustle and bustle of the fashionable household of their French hosts Madame and Monsieur Tabarin near Palermo. She is a "luxury ascetic", he is a gentleman of serene gentility who pursues shady business. The spirit of money wafts around the summer villa, and down in the bay anchors their yacht, the Devil's Kiss, guarded by the butler Balthasar – a man of evil magic who fatally attracts Martha. In Mrs Moore's studio, not far from the Tabarins, Martha models and learns to paint with oil colours. The doors open for her to the secret of an art that seems to lead away from the zeitgeist to the paradise where we all already find ourselves but don't want to know it.

With a keen yet loving eye and her lavish and elegant narrative style, Anna Katharina Fröhlich not only takes us into the absurd world of the Tabarins, but also into the psychological universe of people Plato would have called "dangerous artists".