Lutz Seiler's New Novel Follows a Poet Wandering the Kazakh Steppe

Lutz Seiler has published a new novel centered on a lyric poet who stumbles through the Kazakh steppe. The book's narrative turns on a generational question: the parents are meant to have a better life, but how is that achieved? Seiler's story is set against the Wende, the period of German transformation surrounding 1989. In the novel's framing, the fall of the Berlin Wall may have marked an even deeper rupture than Germany's earlier division. The author is described in the NZZ feature as a shaman of literature. The novel is published in German and reviewed in the Feuilleton section of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.