“When I was eighteen, I went to America for a year. I still sometimes claim I went there on a basketball scholarship, but I didn’t. My grandparents paid for my High School year.” These are the opening lines of Joachim Meyerhoff’s first novel which sends the first-person narrator from his home town in the Northern German province to the wide expanses of western America – on an emotional rollercoaster ride.
The novel’s self-deprecating, sensitive, and pointedly witty tone is crucial. The reader accompanies the young hero on his search for one of the sought-after places as a guest student with an American family. He finds himself in Laramie, Wyoming, with a view of the prairie, horses and the Rocky Mountains. At first, he’s spared the inevitable “culture shock”: he enjoys his varied timetable and looks forward to the forthcoming basketball season. But then a call from home summons him back to his family in Northern Germany – and to a grief he can ultimately only come to terms with by returning to America again.
This fascinating coming-of-age novel is all about love, a foreign land, loss and self-assertion. The reader is captivated by the writer’s sensitivity and wit. "Alle Toten fliegen hoch” simultaneously relates the joys and sorrows of a young man – a literary revelation!
