Louisiana Story

Grinning alligators, sweaty jazz cellars, and in their midst, a young German intellectual. This is what Louisiana might have looked like to the 28-year-old Hans Magnus Enzensberger when he travelled there as a reporter in 1957. There he wrote a story that was forgotten for decades. Hannes Binder has illustrated it for Enzensberger’s 90th birthday, pitch-black and glittering like voodoo needles.

The narrator is a lawyer on an odyssey across New Orleans. He fights his way through the red-light district and mangrove swamps on a mission to deliver a life insurance policy. In the mood of a noir thriller, Enzensberger’s story is replete with carefully researched detail, and steeped in plushness and decay. And its narrative is playful in a way you would not expect from the young author who published his famous debut, Verteidigung der Wölfe (Defence of the Wolves) in the same year.