Winter’s Garden is the second novel from young photographer Valerie Fritsch. The story is divided into three parts, the characters have been reduced to a minimum, the voice is neutral, prosaic, but the images are full of an arresting poetry.

Anton Winter has grown up with his extended, multi-generational family in a large farmhouse in the countryside surrounded by lush garden and thick woods. This garden idyll serves as a kind of cocoon, and his grandmother the epicenter of this world. On the distant horizon one can glimpse the city and the sea, but they are only a backdrop, an extraneous idea almost, and enshrouded in a vaguely threatening air.

In the second part of the story the idyll has been interrupted. Anton, now a grown man, lives alone on the rooftop of a skyscraper in the devastated city and breeding birds of all kinds. The apocalypse seems imminent, chaos reigns, and mass suicides have become the order of the day. One day down at the port, however, he meets a woman, Frederike, and without even a word she comes back with him. And thus – in the middle of the rubble, in the face of death – begins the very first love of his life. Frederike helps out in the abandoned hospital where by now there are only births and pregnant women. There she develops a strong relationship with Marta, a woman who has lost her husband in the chaos. But then, just before giving birth, he reappears: Leander, the brother Anton has not seen in decades.

In the third and final section the five have taken refuge in the »garden«, the brothers’ childhood home. An improvisational existence, somehow they find enough to eat, but have no future, even with a child. One day Leander and Marta go for a walk and never return. Anton and Frederike continue to take care of the child and protect it from the elements while awaiting the end. When Frederike is almost at the end of her strength, Anton carries her naked and catatonic into the snow and together they watch the city burn in the distance. Then nothing. Maybe a new beginning, a couple approaching in the distance. Everything remains unclear.

The novel is highly descriptive and notable for its sparing use of dialogue, which, when it does appear, comes almost entirely in one central chapter entitled »Language«. It is only toward the end of the book that we encounter other fragments before the work once again shifts back into its delicate and finely wrought description.

Winter's Garden