Fernweh
byMadhavi Rao
About the Book
We inherit stories long before we inherit wisdom. But, there comes a point in every life when the story stops making sense.
In the long aftermath of love, ambition, panic, desire, and all the stories we tell ourselves to survive them, a woman wanders through the interiors of a modern life. Men arrive and disappear. Friendships bloom and decay. Bodies are touched, abandoned, remembered. The future never arrives, and the past refuses to leave.
Part love story, part anti-love story, part philosophical coming-of-age, Fernweh is a novel about wanting more from life than life appears willing to give. A novel of erotic disgust, inherited loneliness, failed transcendence, and the unbearable persistence of hope, it asks what remains when every story we have been promised fails to save us.
Told through a narrator who is at once a ruthless witness, an unreliable historian, a failed heroine, and a self-appointed mythmaker, Fernweh explores the dangerous space between life and the stories we tell about it, and asks a simple question:
If we spend our lives narrating ourselves into existence, what happens when the story stops working?
In the long aftermath of love, ambition, panic, desire, and all the stories we tell ourselves to survive them, a woman wanders through the interiors of a modern life. Men arrive and disappear. Friendships bloom and decay. Bodies are touched, abandoned, remembered. The future never arrives, and the past refuses to leave.
Part love story, part anti-love story, part philosophical coming-of-age, Fernweh is a novel about wanting more from life than life appears willing to give. A novel of erotic disgust, inherited loneliness, failed transcendence, and the unbearable persistence of hope, it asks what remains when every story we have been promised fails to save us.
Told through a narrator who is at once a ruthless witness, an unreliable historian, a failed heroine, and a self-appointed mythmaker, Fernweh explores the dangerous space between life and the stories we tell about it, and asks a simple question:
If we spend our lives narrating ourselves into existence, what happens when the story stops working?