An aimless adolescence, straitlaced family, frustrating education – it almost makes the ad “seeking female taxi driver” seem like the absolute salvation. Even if, unfortunately, Alex Herwig’s memory is like a sieve. Nonetheless, she crams street names and routes – and is lucky enough to happen on an extremely forgiving tester. Soon she’s sitting in the front seat of a cab for the first time, in a cold sweat, because she doesn’t know the street her first customer has indicated. And – almost against her will – Alex gets sucked into a clique of colleagues composed of erstwhile students, failed artists, misanthropic non-academics and uptight misogynists – until she meets Marco, an extremely short young man, who’s all the more determinedly proactive as a result…
Karen Duve tells the story of a young woman who’s been short-shrifted by life and who has a job where she’s constantly meeting people who’ve really been short-shrifted by life.
