A twelve-year-old boy tells his story: that of a life shaped by prison walls and classical music.
A child grows up in the early 1960s, in a town that is neither large nor small, in a middle-class family that spends a lot of time making music together. The father is a prison director. It hasn’t been that long since the end of the war, and the parents’ dedication to music and literature is an attempt to make up for what they call their lost years.
Yet the boy sees cracks everywhere in this orderly world. He listens attentively to the political debates between his older brothers and parents at the dining table. But he remains an observer. He increasingly takes refuge in the worlds offered by his imagination. This boy, whom the author sees as a distant brother, tells us about his life and, in so doing, discovers his view of the world. Every now and then, when the 73-year-old Edgar Selge speaks as himself, it becomes clear that the shadows of the generation that lived through the war reach all the way into our present time.
Edgar Selge’s narration is breathless, physical; it takes risks. It is filled with wit and musicality. Whether as Bach or Beethoven, Schubert or Dvořák, a military march or gospel, music wraps itself around the story like a second narrative, accompanying its unflinching push for freedom.
