Kruso

Lutz Seiller

If ever you wanted to a portrait of East Germany at the fall of the Berlin Wall then Kruso is a pretty good place to start. The story takes place on the German Baltic island of Hiddensee in 1989. It follows the journey of Ed, fleeing home in the east and drawn to the enigmatic Kruso. It's a novel of musings, not always easy to comprehend and some parts, like Kruso himself, may remain enigmatic and just of of reach.

Extract

He smelled the sea even before he got off the train. From his childhood (memories of their only trip to the Baltic Sea), he remembered the Hotel am Bahnhof. It lay directly across from the station, a big, beautiful attraction with oriels built as round towers, and weather vanes in which the numerals of the years crumbled.
He let a few cars pass and hesitated. It wouldn't be wise, he thought, especially as far as money was concerned. On the other hand, there was no point in arriving on the island in the afternoon, since there probably wouldn't be enough time left to find a place to stay - if he could find one at all.

Parallels