Turksib

Lutz Seiler first came to be known thanks to his two poetry collections, pech & blende (2000) and vierzig kilometer nacht (2003). For the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Prize in 2007 he offered up his first short story, Turksib, and was subsequently declared the winner.

Ilma Rakusa describes the text’s allure: »With poetic-grotesque precision, Lutz Seiler’s Turksib portrays a winter train journey through radioactively contaminated Kazach landscapes. A small Geiger counter alerts the German narrator to the level of potential danger while his encounter with a Heine-quoting stoker brings Russian-German relations to a boil. In just the smallest of spaces, Seiler manages to capture the precarious present and past and transform a train ride into a complex allegory of a complex reality. This is travel literature of the highest order, full of allusions and connections which, sentence by sentence, reveal what language can do when its poetic power is released.«

The other story contained in this volume, Die Anrufung (The Summoning), is concerned with the source of this language. A professor’s exam question on »beauty« brings the narrator back to an acoustic experience from early childhood: the discovery of his own voice.

»After only a few sentences, a particular tone is struck, and powerful images emerge that we often find only within poetry. Here one encounters the common paradox of good literature: by means of the simplest language, the clearest and most striking images are created […] The way Seiler paints these memories through language turns this slender collection into a small wonder.« Der Tagesspiegel

»Lutz Seiler amazes the reader with intense images of lyrical precision. […] These two stories offer us highly poetic and intense snapshots of particular moments and are at the same time the poetic-theoretical miniatures of a poet who came to be among the storytellers.« Angelika Overath, Neue Zürcher Zeitung