From Above

Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s narrator is looking down onto his own grave, the bereaved friends and neighbours, onto the strange and the familiar in the city that is moaning under the oppressive heat from a bird’s-eye perspective. With no body and no will of his own he drifts through the sky above Berlin, appears here and there, a silent messenger, witness to beautiful and horrible things, with supernatural hearing and vision, but condemned to the complete inability to act. His memories are sketchy, his future uncertain. What can he hope, what does he have to fear: Hell? Purgatory? Heavenly paradise?

In her new novel, Sibylle Lewitscharoff – »the shrewd lock keeper between this mortal world and the beyond« (Süddeutsche Zeitung) – fearlessly questions our conception of God and our existence, our perception of self and world, of living and dying. At the end of this bold journey of the soul through contemporary Berlin, into the intermediate realm of the living and the dead, every sense of order is dissolved: It ends in an apotheosis that holds a surprising understanding of ourselves.

» ... a brilliant novel that seems like a sum of the many topics of Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s literary works and that creates pathos while destroying it at the same time.« Paul Jandl, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»Lewitscharoff’s great mastery consists of blending realistic narration with the sphere of the supernatural in such a way that even the world beyond the rationally perceptible seems entirely rational and believable.« Sigrid Löffler

»Sibylle Lewitscharoff is a linguistic temptress.« Joachim Dicks, NDR

»This is a poetics of the vertical in which everything strives upwards, towards the planetary, the lunar, and the stellar.« Richard Kämmerlings, Die Literarische Welt

»On the one hand, its satirical elements are captivating, on the other hand it’s also pensive and quizzical. The profound humour of these pieces of prose is unique: never overly dramatic or pompous, even when it’s about Christian Kabbalists and images of Jesus, but always sharp and trenchant.« Helmut Böttiger, Deutschlandfunk Kultur

» [...] The mastery of this novel, the mastery in Lewitscharoff’s style, lies in the fact that it is rooted in the ethical. Because the how of the narration decides ›whether it contains the minuscule messianic detonating caps that literature is in such dire need of,‹ as she formulated it in her lecture on poetics. Realizing this is also a worthwhile task for the reader.« Die Tagespost