Genre: Literary Ficiton
Number of pages: 320
Publication date: 18 July 2017
A book about love, death and uncertainties: clever, touching and brilliantly humorous.
With this novel, Mariana Leky reveals clearly that she is one of the most original and finest storytellers of her generation.
Selma can foresee death – someone in the village always dies the day after the okapi appears in her dreams. However, the dreams never reveal who is going to die. So, when the okapi shows up, one thing is clear to everybody in the village: this is an emergency and something has to be done! In her novel, Mariana Leky describes the fear of the local residents, what they blindly risk, admit, destroy, or bring into order. Yet that is not everything, by far. Selma’s granddaughter Luise has other things to worry about. Her great love Frederik decided to move to Japan and to live in a monastery as a Buddhist monk…
What You Can See From Here is the portrait of a village in which everything is miraculously connected. But above all it is a book about love under difficult circumstances as the various “objects of desire” have a strong tendency to withdraw.
Mariana Leky was born in Cologne in 1973 and currently lives in Berlin. After training as a bookseller, she studied cultural journalism at the University of Hildesheim. In 2000, she won the Allegra Prize for her first set of short stories. She was honored with the Lower Saxony Literary Advancement Award and a grant from the State of Bavaria for her short story collection, Liebesperlen. In 2005, she was awarded the Advancement Prize for Young Artists, in the category Poetry/Writing, from the State of North Rhine-Westfalia for her novel Erste Hilfe. DuMont Buchverlag published Liebesperlen (2001), Erste Hilfe (2004), Die Herrenausstatterin (2010), Bis der Arzt kommt (2013) and Was man von hier aus sehen kann (2017).
Photo (c) Franziska Hauser