Herscht 07769

The National Book Award winners breathtaking new novel about neo-Nazis, particle physics, and Johann Sebastian BachAWASHINGTON POSTNOTABLE BOOK OF 2024APUBLISHERS WEEKYBEST BOOK OF 2024The gentle giant Florian Herscht has a problem: having faithfully attended Herr Khlers adult education classes in physics, he is convinced that disaster is imminent. And so, he embarks upon a one-sided correspondence with Chancellor Angela Merkel, to convince her of the danger of the complete destruction of all physical matter. Otherwise, he works for the Boss (the head of a local neo-Nazi gang), who has taken him under his wing and gotten him work as a graffiti cleaner and also a one-room apartment in the small eastern German town of Kana. The Boss is enraged by a graffiti artist who, with wolf emblems, is defacing all the various monuments to Johann Sebastian Bach in Thuringia. A Bach fanatic and director of an amateur orchestra, he is determined to catch the culprit with the help of his gang, and Florian has no choice but to join the chase. The situation becomes even more frightening, and havoc ensues, when real wolves are sighted in the areaWritten in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding, Krasznahorkais novel is a tour de force, a morality play, a blistering satire, a devastating encapsulation of our helplessness when confronted with the moral and environmental dilemmas we face.