The Real Life of Alvaro Maderholz

At one beginning, whilst plumes of smoke still drift over the Chilean presidential palace and news of Salvador Allende’s death is making the rounds, a child’s first cry is heard. At the other beginning, the writer Clemens Böckmann, whilst working on a research project in Eisenerz, Austria, stumbles by chance upon the trail of a poet who died in a ski-jumping accident. And in between, the whole story unfolds: the true life of Alvaro Maderholz, who, as he took off from the ski jump, hoped to escape the gravity of his own family history, marked by war, exile and ideology.

Tracing a literary trail across continents, Clemens Böckmann weaves together archive material, passport copies and poems into a polyphonic text about origin and invention, about the power of documents and the seductive nature of storytelling – and, not least, into a crime novel full of twists and turns, feints and leads concerning the temptation to find, amidst the rubble of history, a truth that may always have been fiction.