The Bees and the Invisible

Pure meaning, pure poetry – this idea seems to worry and spur on people throughout the centuries. It is the driving force behind the invention of languages like Esperanto, Volapük or Blissymbolics. Clemens J. Setz traces the anecdotes behind these constructed languages in The Bees and the Invisible, in keeping with the motto: »Tell the best story you know, as truthfully as possible.‹

And this story features, among others, Charles Bliss and his ideographic language and children with disabilities who are able to express themselves for the first time using Blissymbolics. It tells how Clemens J. Setz studies Volapük one summer long and develops his own language. It deals with probably the only person who ever lived whose mother tongue is Volapük and with the language of Talossa, constructed for the micronation of the same name founded by a teenager in his bedroom in 1979. With Klingon and High Valyrian, a language created for the TV series Game of Thrones. And with Esperanto, the biggest success story in the world of constructed languages, whose speakers were persecuted under Stalin and Hitler and with the aid of which a young, blind Russian became a poet, adventurer and anarchist global scholar. It is always the strange mixing of deep existential crisis and invention of language that Setz detects and that fascinates him – and so this book is also the personal story of the wordsmith Clemens J. Setz.

»Setz explores a fascinating continent that lies behind the books, the names and words, and nothing in it can be taken for granted. Just as in art.« Kolja Reichert, DIE ZEIT

»[Clemens J. Setz’s] sentences tower like lopsided trees and offer their knots as spyholes into a different reality. Language and world are dancing with one another here, this where they keep stepping on each other’s toes.« Michael Wolf, Der Tagesspiegel

»Those who appreciate Clemens J. Setz‘s unconventional, sometimes outlandish novels and stories that fascinate particularly with their inscrutability […] might not be able to decrypt Setz’s universe completely by reading The Bees and the Invisible, but they will be able to explore the poet’s winding, seemingly endless creations.« Wiebke Porombka, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»a terrific declaration of love to his material and his tool: language« Marianna Lieder, DIE WELT

»[…] a dirty cave system branching out in all directions that is ready to undermine the entire literary scene with its love for tradition and its canonisations of so-called world literature.« Selmar Schülein, der Freitag

»A book with the information value of a dissertation and the entertainment value of stories ...« Christian Dinger, taz. die tageszeitung

»Clemens J. Setz has turned the almost obsessive examination of his own fascination for constructed languages into a text that oscillates between personal essay, reportage, study and story, that is educational and not least of all very funny, full of puns and serious.« Anja Höfer, SWR