Half Pigeon Half Peacock

I am surrendered to the white, as the white is surrendered to me. Here I am exposed to fear; here, fear is exposed.

A self finds itself, on »Sunday morning, half past seven, on the shores with the great crested grebes«. From here, a landscape is surveyed, whose contours only become clear through speaking and walking. Like floes, texts emerge from the whiteness. They expand, their edges overlapping one another, and drift away. »Often, something breaks off.«

The voice that speaks here takes the reader along, with the security of a sleepwalker, through the cartography of an internal world. Leading beyond the borders of the book into a dimension where reading becomes listening, and the overall structure is rearranged on an acoustic level.

Maren Kames’s debut is a text that »is produced through the use of all registers.« In Half Pigeon Half Peacock, she develops a unique language, a score full of humour, highly literary, daring, and crystal clear. First published in 2016 and previously lost to the world, it is now finally available again in a new edition by Suhrkamp.