Moons before the Landing

Worms in the early twenties of the last century. Peter Bender, a former lieutenant pilot in the German Army, makes a name for himself as the founder of a new religious community and with the proclamation of the so-called Hollow World Theory: according to this theory, humanity does not live on, but inside a sphere, outside of which nothing exists. Bender’s flock stays small, but nevertheless he is sentenced to several months in prison for distributing inflammatory and blasphemous pamphlets. When word gets out that his wife was Jewish after the Nazis seize power, even his closest followers turn their backs on him. The Benders fall into poverty and the repressions against his wife become unbearable until the family is arrested and deported in 1942. Only Bender’s son survives the concentration camp.

In his long-awaited new novel, Clemens J. Setz reconstructs the real story of a life and a family that is as moving as it is disturbing. But beyond that, Moons before the Landing is also an investigation of the destructive delusion of a manic egocentric and an illustration of contrarianism avant la lettre: startlingly topical, of unsurpassable linguistic and intellectual originality.

»Setz’s observations conjure up a vivid picture of people, places, and situations, and he achieves the impressive feat of completely recreating the deranged mindset of his protagonist. His extraordinary prose style is clear, sophisticated, and elaborate – a joy to read!« New Books in German

»There are few other writers able to create such fantastic interconnections of the organic and the mechanical, the animate and the inanimate.« Jutta Person, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»[Setz] gifts readers a monumental novel.« Florian Eichel, Die Zeit

»... through bold metaphors and synesthetic connections even the most everyday fragment of reality is presented as an exceptional case of individual perception. Hardly any other writer of contemporary German-language literature has the ability to present this disarrangement of focus as suggestively as Setz ...« Richard Kämmerlings, Welt am Sonntag

»The illuminating thing about Clemens Setz’s new novel is that present and past are not brought into a state of mutual denunciation. The novel neither passes judgement nor draws its conclusions. It observes and describes.« Paul Jandl, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»His aesthetics are so unique in German-language literature – and not just in this context – that it would not be inappropriate to describe Clemens J. Setz using any and all available superlatives one could think of.« Marie Schmidt, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»One gets a sense of how much pleasure Setz has taken in exploring his main character, and how he expounds his crazy ideas without judging or making fun of them.« Gerrit Bartels, Der Tagesspiegel

»Through the images in the novel, Setz playfully manages to keep his retelling gentle and in a state of historical suspension, but at the same time he brings it close to the present.« Tobias Rüther, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

»In his brilliant novel Moons before the Landing, Clemens J. Setz tells the story of a crazy man and evil times.« Judith von Sternburg, Frankfurter Rundschau

»The terrific novel Moons before the Landing by Clemens J. Setz tells the story of Peter Bender, a hollow-world proponent from Worms, and explores the question of how an open society should deal with crude theories.« Carsten Otte, taz am wochenende

»Setz succeeds in telling German history through the eyes of a person who lives in a parallel universe.« ORF