A novel about the power of storytelling, fact and fiction, real countries of milk and honey and false paradises, about love and death - as if Stanislaw Lem, P. G. Wodehouse, Arno Schmidt, and Wolf Haas had written a book together.
Truth be told, Julia Bacharach didn’t really want to fall in love at all right now. Not in an almost empty hotel bar – and definitely not with a guy like Bodo von Unruh. But she’s open-minded and curious, and he’s traveling around the world for a magazine, researching stories that are more mind-expanding than the best drugs.
There’s a reportage, for example, about a legendary, invitation-only restaurant that offers completely new taste sensations, but only if you first sign a contract agreeing to blindly follow the staff’s instructions, no matter what; or a long-forgotten city in Siberia, completely cybernetically controlled, where only decisions that are best for the common good are made; or about descendants of the Bavarian Soviet Republic who are living out their anarchist ideals in the Brazilian jungle; and on and on. Over time, Julia starts noticing that something is off about Bodo. But, for the longest time, he manages to keep her under his spell with his grandiose stories.
