When Will it Finally Be Like it Never Was Again?

Madly entertaining, incredibly funny and yet deeply sad

Is it normal to grow up among hundreds of physically and mentally disabled people? As the son of the director of a children and adolescent psychiatric hospital, the young hero in Meyerhoff’s second novel doesn’t know any different – and actually really likes it.

His father is in charge of 1,200 patients but at home retreats into his reading chair. His mother organises the daily routine but is at odds with her role as housewife. His brothers are whole-heartedly devoted to their hobbies and have nothing but malice for him. He is having a hard time with the letters of the alphabet and with keeping his temper under control. The only time he is really happy is when he can ride on the shoulders of a gigantic resident patient through the grounds of the mental hospital.

In a tender and funny way Joachim Meyerhoff writes about a strange family living in a strange place. He tells of a father who in theory is brilliant but in practice always fails. Who else manages after deciding to do more exercise on his 40th birthday to immediately pull a ligament? Or who else gets his sailing boat in distress by wind calm after having managed to throw his son overboard first?

The fiery nucleus of this novel is death, the loss that cannot be compensated, the longing that persists – and memory, that mercifully produces such an incredibly blazing, vivid and curious story.