It has been an eventful eternity since Alexander Gorkow was last on Majorca, in the small bay of Canyamel, where he spent formative childhood vacations in the late 1960s. After more than three decades, the well-traveled author and journalist asks himself: Whatever became of Canyamel?
The Hotel Laguna is really just an endearing old family hotel. But for Alexander Gorkow it is one of the most beautiful hotels in the world, for he was a child in the bay of Canyamel, dreaming about witches, racing through the rocks and caves with Majorcan friends. With his admired, eccentric father, he would enter the boiling hot phone booth every day: the only connection to the outside world. Moved and shaken, he now discovers that this love is still blazing, like the sand under his feet. In a world that is no longer the old one, he meets friends from back then – and finds new ones. And, of all things, the author’s return to the “Island of the Germans” turns out to be the journey of a lifetime for him. For what he sees clearly here are his – our – losses and dreams.
Gorkow’s passionate, smart and in equal measure angry and upbeat book is also a history of a mentality: about us Germans, our vacations, our country and our longings.
