The Clouds were Huge and White, Drifting in the Sky

Matthias Zschokke brings to life the uncanny behind the ordinary as no other can – he breathes poetry into everyday things.

Matthias Zschokke never gives his heroes extraordinary skills; one does not look up to them in admiration or envy. On the contrary: he places his protagonists side by side with the reader, then he sits down beside them himself and watches them in amazement as they go about their everyday activities. And the things he discovers in the process!
His new novel is about someone who lies down when he is full and gets up again when he is hungry. He likes it when the woman he lives with lies down beside him and gets up when he does. Nevertheless, the great fateful questions of life do not pass him by. This hero has a mother who wishes to die. His friend, likewise, has no great desire to carry on living. Both of them hope that the hero might deliver them from their vale of tears. But he has no idea how to go about it. He prefers to go out for coffee, watch dogs, women and men going about their lives, which sometimes pleases him and sometimes not, eat cheese, which he sometimes likes and sometimes not, look at wet shoelaces on children’s shoes and wispy clouds chasing after seagulls. He finds all of this so interesting that he almost forgets about his mother and his friend.

Matthias Zschokke, born in Berne in 1954, grew up in Aargau and the canton of Berne. He has lived in Berlin since 1980, where he works as an author and filmmaker. He made his debut in 1982 with the novel »Max«, for which he was awarded the Robert Walser Prize, and has published a large number of novels, plays and feature films. Matthias Zschokke has been awarded prestigious prizes including the Gerhart Hauptmann Prize, the Solothurn Literature Prize, was the first German-speaking author ever to win the Prix Femina étranger for the novel »Maurice mit Huhn« (Maurice with Chicken) and the »Eidgenössischer Literaturpreis« (Swiss Literature Prize) for »Der Mann mit den zwei Augen« (The Man with Two Eyes).