After 22 years of working for international aid organizations, 65-year-old Asta finds herself stranded in the Munich airport. Pushed out of her most recent job in a health clinic in Nicaragua by her colleagues, she’s standing by the revolving door, smoking. She didn’t really want to come back but because her mistakes on the job were starting to pile up, she was handed a one-way ticket. And now she doesn’t know what’s next. She’s only reasonably happy when she’s needed. And who could possibly need her, decommissioned nurse that she is?
Asta observes her surroundings and takes stock of her life, remembering the people she once knew and the adventures she had. With each cigarette, Asta delves deeper into her past – and, with each episode, the narrator presents another variation on an extremely current and existential topic: helping and its risks.
With a sense for the comic and the unfathomable, Katja Lange-Müller shows how memories and make-believe converge and delivers yet more proof of her terrific storytelling talent.
»Caritas and Eros coalesce oddly in Katja Lange-Müller’s writing. Her language is extremely extravagant. Yet the originality of her formulations is always in the service of precision.« – Ijoma Mangold on Böse Schafe (Angry Sheep)
