Tao

Very few people know that Tobi’s real name is Tao. Only Miriam calls him by his Chinese name when they are alone together. When she breaks up with him, Tao travels by car across Europe to escape his grief over the separation. But the memory of the years they spent together haunts him, nor will the death of his father loosen its grip on him: years ago, he disappeared in Hong Kong while searching for the birthplace of his own father, Tao’s grandfather. Now it is Tao who sets out on the trail of his ancestors and begins to write in order to make sense of his own history and that of his family, which spans from China to Indonesia to Germany.

Yannic Han Biao Federer tells the story of a search for traces along biographical fractures and historical fault lines, both in the German province as well as in the tension-filled Hong Kong of today. His novel Tao asks how shared memory can be told, to whom it belongs – and what it promises.

»Tao is a multicoloured, shimmering mosaic whose stones and pebbles form a fascinating picture as you read.« Martin Oehlen, Frankfurter Rundschau

»Tao is a clever novel about the act of writing. About the search for an engaged literature dedicated to the complexity of memory, identity and language. Refreshing!« Eva Tepest, taz. die tageszeitung

»Federer creates the desire for belonging … with stylistic and dramatic confidence.« WDR

»Tao by Yannic Han Biao Federer is an elegantly told story that repeatedly questions its narrative means in a playful way, in a musical language that plays with motifs like an étude and thus very sensually circles the elements that make up a biography.« BR24

»A sensitive novel about the difficult construct we call ›biography‹.« Nicole Strecker, WDR