In her delicately interwoven poetic narratives about displacement and flight, Yanara Friedland expands the historical space into a wide field of associations. By brilliantly blending fact and fantasy, she creates a region not bound by the laws of space and time, which quite a few figures roam. Friedland explores this uncountry in the four books "Ashes", "Breath", "Hunger" and "Future", in order to interweave individual memory and experience with historical facts and cultural-historical reflection - and with Jewish intellectual history - in ever new patterns of movement. Here the nameless, deserter soldier throws his helmet into the ditch, here the biblical Esther crosses the path, here Abraham wrangles with the son sacrifice and here the pregnant mother of the author moves into the Bendlerblock. The result is a landscape of searching for traces and imagination, of dreams and longings, created with words, which more and more overlays every visible place more and more.
Awards
Noemi Press Fiction Award 2015
United Kingdom, United States
Sample translation
Complete English original text available
Complete German translation available
Yanara Friedland, born in Berlin in 1983, is a writer, translator, and lecturer living in the American Northwest. Her essays and prose texts deal with migration narratives, autofictions, and border crossers.
One must abandon oneself to its pull in order to participate in "how language happens to us". Reading then literally becomes an event, it happens in the individual sentence, in the individual image, in the ever new contexts that open up. And finally, it is a reading that concerns us: because it makes it clear that we also reach back behind the visible, the material form of our existence. And because it invites us to grasp our place in the world anew." - Petra Nagenkögel, Spectrum
