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How do we become – or not become – the people that we have become? This is the fundamental question addressed in Christoph Hein’s novel, a novel that consistently views things from the perspective of painter Paula Trousseau.
Sometimes availing herself of dynamic situational descriptions, sometimes employing a kind of fast-forward technique, Hein recounts the adventures of the self-assertion of a woman whose outlook and experiences cast a spell over the reader, who is then torn between sympathy and rejection.
When, in the novel's first pages, readers first hear about the painter, they are immediately told that she committed suicide in France in the year 2000. And they are able to follow her version of things from her diary entries: her view of the world, of art, of the relationship between the sexes and her experiences with men and women. How, against the will of her parents and her husband, she decides to study art – at the price of hardening her heart against everybody and everything. All her relationships with men are doomed to failure, those with women tend to be more constant but cannot prevent gray tones from dominating her pictures. Where does this indifference to other people and, in the final analysis, to herself, actually come from? Is her background responsible for this, or is it the political circumstances, the hierarchy of the sexes, the cultural situation? How do we become what we are?
»Frau Paula Trousseau is a courageous novel, beyond great gestures.« Süddeutsche Zeitung
»Christoph Hein’s new novel tells the life of an artist with an epic sweep but without losing sight of its central figure […] This is the story of successful emancipation and of the bitter price she had to pay to achieve it: her life. […] Frau Paula Trousseau is a tremendously rich book.« FR
Christoph Hein, born in 1944, lives in Berlin. He is the author of novels, novellas, short stories, plays, essays and children’s books. His most recent novels were on the Spiegel bestseller list for weeks. His most recent awards include the 2019 Prix du Meilleur livre étranger (for Glückskind mit Vater), the 2019 Samuel Bogumił Linde Prize and the 2017 Grimmelshausen Prize.
Christoph Hein, born in 1944, lives in Berlin. He is the author of novels, novellas, short stories, plays, essays and children’s books. His...
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Serbia (Čigoja štampa), Iran (Rahsaa Publications)
The late 1950s in the divided Germany: as the son of a pastor, 14-year-old Daniel is barred from taking the Abitur, the secondary school leaving examination, in his East German hometown and so he...
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A brilliant chronicle of the lives of two families in 20th century Germany and Russia. The futile hope for an existence beyond misery and slavery. Encompassing an entire century, reflecting an entire century.
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Ten-year-old Ulla lives with her brothers Karel and Paul, the dog Strolch and her parents. The father is a sculptor, the mother a director and Ulla’s best friend, beautiful and always laughing....
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Leipzig 1968: Historian Dallow is released from prison after twenty-one months. His crime: He filled in as a piano player at a student cabaret and the text that he was asked to accompany with a...
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Thomas was almost a child still at the time, but he remembers the events in sleepy bad Guldenberg in the summer of 1957 very well: how he started working for the gypsies and was punished for it by...
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»I have become invulnerable. I have bathed in dragon’s blood, and no linden leaf anywhere left me unprotected. I can never get out of this skin.« This is the conclusion of the...
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