Genre: Literary Ficiton
Number of pages: 200
Publication date: Mar 01 2017
Every day, the retired entrepreneur Walter Nowak swims his laps in the outdoor pool. An encounter on a particularly hot morning throws him off kilter and the consequences are fatal: Walter finds himself stretched out on his bathroom floor, unable to move, his head throbbing. He thinks of Yvonne, but she has taken off for a conference. Walter is on his own. »From now on it’s downwards, ever downwards« he thinks. And it seems to be true. He continues to lose control over the situation. He finds himself buried underneath thought fragments and images from the past: there is that Christmas Eve with Gisela, her pork roast, her tears; the look on the face of his son Felix when he learns about the separation; memories from his own childhood as the son of an American GI born out of wedlock and finally, the diagnosis his urologist has just revealed to him. While all the images get more and more blurry, his thoughts begin to move in circles that grow smaller and smaller – nearing a hidden core, the beginning or the end … When the summer storm finally begins to thunder, his son Felix suddenly appears in front of his door!
Julia Wolf turns her protagonist inside out with great narrative authority: Walter Nowak, an aging man, a child of the post-war era, finds himself at a crossroads. His stream of consciousness takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the human psyche and showcases Julia Wolf’s virtuous command of language.
Julia Wolf, born in 1980 in Groß-Gerau, Germany, now lives in Berlin and Leipzig. For her debut novel Alles ist jetzt (All is Now) she was awarded the Kunstpreis Literatur, a prize funded by the Brandenburg Lotto GmbH, and she also received numerous grants. At the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition 2016, she read an excerpt from her novel Walter Nowak won’t get up and received the prestigious 3sat Prize in the process.