The Bird Meadow

Longlisted for the German Book Prize 2013
English sample translation available
Recommended for translation by New Books in German

Uwe Timm’s wonderfully choreographed and multi-faceted novel describes the power of desire with great intensity and, at the same time, almost meditative calm. It’s a precise, beautiful, humorous and smart story about the mysterious rules of the game of life and the art of saying goodbye.

A man has lost everything – his girlfriend, his mistress, his career, his apartment. He’s declared bankruptcy and is saddled with tons of debt. He’s been living on his own for a while on an island at the mouth of the River Elbe, where he works as a bird warden. It’s a downright reclusive existence that’s about to be shaken up by a phone call.

Anna announces that she’s coming to visit – the very same Anna who’d fled from him to New York six years earlier and who’d completely turned his life upside down prior to that. And while Eschenbach prepares for a reunion with her and continues his everyday routines of bird counting and collecting flotsam and jetsam, he is visited by ghosts of the past and the story of Eschenbach, Selma, Anna and Ewald unfolds.

It’s the story of two couples who were happy with each other, but who couldn’t stay that way once Eschenbach became inflamed with passion for Anna – a passion that was vast and forbidden, so right and so wrong. Uwe Timm gives rise to a well-defined image of today’s world, when choosing a partner is always put to the test and guided, on the one hand, by optimization strategies, and, on the other hand, by unbridled irrationality.