A novel about a special friendship and the search for one’s own life story
Titus Brose has an unusual profession: he writes memoirs and finds his clients mainly in a retirement home on the outskirts of Berlin. One day, he mixes up two biographies and is baffled when his client Wanda doesn’t even realize that it is not her own life she is reading about. He seriously starts to doubt himself and the art of writing memoirs – who should be trusted, the person who has experienced life or the person who writes it down?
But then Brose meets Dr. Einhorn, who gets him to deal with the biographies of two deceased: Adelbert von Chamisso and his friend and editor Eduard Hitzig. Hitzig not only wrote a posthumous biography of Chamisso, but was also responsible for some of the most exciting episodes in Chamisso’s life. Fascinated by this unusual relationship, Brose sets off on a research trip that takes him into his own past in the divided Berlin.
A ravishingly funny and philosophical novel by the author of Der Zimmerspringbrunnen (“The Indoor Fountains”), the classic novel about German reunification.
