Maike Wetzel
Floating Bridges
fiction, new
A Sunday on the lake. A woman sits on the bank and hugs her two small children. What was supposed to be a lovely weekend has turned into something else entirely. The sailboat has capsized and the father is missing. He cannot possibly have drowned in this harmless lake, can he? Surely, he’ll resurface and joke about his wife’s fears. As the emergency helicopter circles overhead, the narrator remembers her life with this man, her counterpart in a moving marriage.
With relentless candour and great linguistic precision, Maike Wetzel writes about going on after everything changes and finding solace in our own memories and in literature. In the tradition of Joan Didion, Maggie Nelson, Oceon Vuong, and Marguerite Duras, the author tells a very personal but also impressively universal tale of love, grief, and parenthood. Floating Bridges is a gripping farewell and a touchingly honest novel about surviving as a mother and writer.
Reviews
»The fragmented form of the novel blesses the book with a lightness, with an elegance, despite the heavy subject matter.«
Thorsten Dönges / Berliner Zeitung
»The novel is told in quiet tones and yet unfolds a tremendous force over its 200 or so pages. This is mainly due to Maike Wetzel's precise language and the images she finds for loss and grief.«
Tino Dallmann, MDR Kultur
»A profoundly moving book. The word ‘autofiction’ does not at all do the work justice. What we are reading is the spiritual and literary examination of a terrible misfortune. As if out of the blue, a catastrophe shatters a life—and then, broken, it is pieced back together again and goes on. I am tremendously impressed with how Maike Wetzel tells this story.«
Daniel Kehlmann
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