All in a Moment

“After all the years of common ground and shared experience, he was suddenly struck by a staggering realisation: this is no longer my wife.” Botho Strauß’s prescient stories, essays and notes inevitably focus on that pivotal moment when everything is altered irrevocably; when love burns away into thin air, when life’s scaffolding begins to tremble and blur at the edges. Encapsulating that crucial instant, he subjects it to the magnifying lens of intricate scrutiny. The consequences tend to be sinister – it might seem to the casual eye as though “the senses are resilient, unfurling like grass trampled underfoot;” yet tiny scars remain, frailties that over time lead to emotional meltdown.