Anyone who ventures on a trip through three decades of Maxim Biller’s narrative work will notice this: Along the way, certain places, events and family members appear again and again. But they’re always different: they never resemble themselves exactly, everything always happens in constantly new variations – a virtuoso game of reality and fiction.
Moscow, Prague, Hamburg, Munich, Tel Aviv, Berlin – these are fixed points in Biller’s narrative cosmos, which takes us far and wide through the 20th century, with all its catastrophes, through the cataclysms of wars, Stalinism, the Shoah and emigration, but where we also spend long Russian-Jewish nights at the kitchen table with plenty of food, drink and conversation.
Biller’s family mythology is addictive: It’s a delight to experience it in all its variations and to go in search of the secrets that underpin many of these bittersweet, funny and sad stories.
