The Everyday World

Everyday life is full of wonders and impositions. The world: a place yet to be discovered. Karl-Markus Gauß’ latest book is a lesson in astonishment.

The spectrum spanned by this rebuttal of the zeitgeist covers the two years between 2011 and 2013. Karl-Markus Gauss tells of a Korean woman who marries herself, he studies the Fukushima reactor disaster, British urban riots and German forgers; he muses on the deaths of close friends and his own attempts to lead a worthy life in an unworthy world.

With a mixture of self-deprecating irony and contemplative, melancholy wit, Gauss traces sounds, attitudes and character types that have long since disappeared. In separate narrative threads he describes »magic moments of failure« and »the history of love«, eventually concluding that the true story of mankind is to be found in poetry and literature.