My Father Was a Man on Land and a Whale in the Water - Softcover

Steinbeck, Michelle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1850773181 ISBN 13: 9781850773184

Publisher: Darf Publishers, 2018

Synopsis

A young woman goes on a perilous journey in search of her absent father. What ensues is a Freudian adult fairytale in this exciting debut by young Swiss author Michelle Steinbeck. A child attacks Loribeth with an iron while she is sleeping. In retaliation Loribeth throws the iron onto the child from an upstairs window, packs the damaged body into a suitcase and sets off on her travels. Thus starts Steinbeck’s unusual, poetic novella about a young woman’s transition from childhood to adulthood. In this fantastical novella, Steinbeck depicts her protagonist’s unsettled state of mind in poetic and energetic prose.

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Review

If this is the next generation, then God help us! – Elke Heidenreich, SRF
Splendidly overwrought! – Frankfurter Rundschau
The hell of adolescence is a flashing fairground with derailing rollercoasters. Lucidly absurdist prose fluctuating between panic and the comical, and of the finest quality - Sabine Vogel, Berliner Zeitung

There’s this breathless, surging prose style, a spectacular density of ideas; a pleasure in sonic association. – Sebastian Fanzun, NZZ

It’s like a pilled up journey to hell through scenes taken straight out of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch – Anne-Sophie Scholl, Berner Zeitung

Unconventional, perplexing, irritating and wild – Sandra Trauner, Ostthüringer Zeitung

Here comes something extraordinary – Simone Keller, Basler Zeitung

Furious! – Perlentaucher

Just like an action-packed comic book - Julia Stephan, Zentralschweiz am Sonntag

Incredibly disturbing. – kapriziös

A novel like Breughel’s Hell - – Sandra Trauner, Passauer Neue Presse

Literary institutions and creative writing courses probably don’t have guidlines for this. It says ‚novel‘ on the cover, but it enters the reader’s mind as images – NZZ Bücher am Sonntag

After the final sentences of the book have come to an end it feels like you’ve awoken from a dream. One of those dreams that leaves you with a thumping heart and rubbing your eyes in disbelief. The complexity of emotions that Steinbeck achieves with her virtuosic language is astonishing. My Father was a Man on Land and a Whale in Water is like reading a playground for fiction, where everything is allowed and where everything has a place. – Martina Keller, Viceversa

From the first page of Steinbeck’s book it reads like a piece of unruly, flailing prose... In opposition to the tendency to build new monuments to realism, Steinbeck uses her unfettered imagination, which is unrivalled in the contemporary Swiss literary landscape - Daniel Faulhaber, TagesWoche

Michelle Steinbeck succeeds in creating strong imagery time and time again through her symbolic language. There’s no doubt about it: the themes are universal and timeless. - Isabel Hemmel, Züritipp
Michelle Steinbeck’s debut novel is remarkable: her unique, sometimes breathless, at times breathtaking tone draws on the fantastical surrealist narrative tradition, but she nevertheless finds her own images and proves to be a humorous lateral thinker - Julian Schütt, SRF
A successful balancing act between surrealism and critically observed reality. And in doing so, she pinpoints the mentality of contemporary society exactly: nothing is good enough and we can only hope for something better. – Seraina Jörg, St. Galler Tagblatt

Edition details

• Publisher: Darf Publishers
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1850773181
• ISBN 13: 9781850773184
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128