Moor

Gunther Geltinger

Translated by Alexander Booth

 

6 x 9 inches, 376 pp. February 2017

ISBN : 9780857423689

Rs  750.00 (HB)
$30.00 (HB)
£21.00 (HB)

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It’s the early 1970s and Dion Katthusen, thirteen, is growing up fatherless in a small village in northern Germany. An only child plagued with a devastating stutter, Dion is ostracized by his peers and finds solace in the company of nature, collecting dragonflies in a moor filled with myths and legends. On the precipice of adulthood, Dion begins to spill the secrets of his heart—his burning desire for faultless speech and his abiding relationship with his mother, a failed painter with secrets of her own. Even as Dion spins his story, his speech is filled with fissures and holes—much like the swampy earth that surrounds him. Nature, though so often sublime, can also be terribly cruel.

 

Moor is Dion’s story—a story of escaping the quicksand of loneliness and of the demands we make on love, even as those surrounding us are hurt in their misguided attempts to bear our suffering. A mysterious and experimental portrait of childhood, Moor is evocative and bold—Dion’s story emerges from the forces of nature, his voice rising from the ground beneath the reader’s feet, not soon to be forgotten.

Gunther Geltinger was born in 1974 in Erlenbach am Main and lives in Cologne. He studied scriptwriting and dramaturgy at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna and at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. Geltinger’s critically acclaimed debut novel Mensch Engel (Man Angel) was published in 2008. Moor, longlisted for the prestigious Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize, is his second novel.

 

Alexander Booth is a writer and translator who lives in Berlin.

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