Ireland is an inconceivable country – unless we are seeing it through Ralph Giordano’s eyes. With his books on Israel and East Prussia he has created a new type of travel literature.
The Irish are different. The national character of this people torn by inner conflicts is equally strange and loveable. Where do people revere their poets more passionately than in Ireland? Where else do lottery winners celebrate their good fortune in public? And where else did melancholy and excess get married? In a part of Europe’s Emerald Isle, hatred still rules. To this very day, Protestants and Catholics are facing each other as hostile groups. The everyday threat of violent outbursts lingers on, although a majority in both groups is in favour of peace. How long will Northern Ireland’s people have to be scared of bomb blasts?
Ralph Giordano combines sensibility and an analytical mind in a poetical hymn on a country that appears to be backward and beautiful to us. In colourful words he depicts people and events. Giordano roams almost every county of the island, and strikes up a conversation everywhere. In the North, he gets stuck between the front lines of the conflict, for weeks he follows the traces of Irish poets, and finally, on the banks of Lough Sheelin, finds the paradise he was searching for all his life.
