ASYMMETRY

ASYMMETRY is in fact comprised of two novellas—“Folly” and “Madness”—plus a short coda that reprises a character from the first. “Folly” is the story of Alice, a young American editor with a famous and much older writer in New York during the early years of the Iraq War. “Madness” is narrated by Amar, a young Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. The stories are very different stylistically—one might call them asymmetrical—and the experience of moving from “Folly” to “Madness” is initially a disorienting one. But as a subtle connection between the two emerges, the book becomes one of the most original and unusual Kuenstlerromane we've ever encountered, as well as a meditation on the asymmetries on which our world is built: power, money, fame, talent, luck, injustice, history and—perhaps most acutely of all—the question of what any individual can do with the aleatory brevity of life in the face of the certain eternity of death.

ASYMMETRIE
Deutsch von Stefanie Jacobs
[HC Hanser 07/18; TB Btb 07/2020]