The Night with Alice when Julia Prowled around the House

A book of dreams, of transformations, of abysses. Every night, Botho Strauß tells us, we visit the "school of expansion" that refreshes our memories of real and potential love. We dream of others, long for others, become others ourselves – because the pleasures of love are inexhaustible only for those capable of perpetual metamorphosis. All the things that appear solid and rational by day dissolve in the wide space of dreams. A nocturnal passage begins, a train of ghosts. Figures emerge from the darkness, looking for all the world like people we know. They dominate the scene and tell their stories: an actor who can no longer hear his own voice; a man with a hidden personality only revealed on his deathbed; and another who suddenly declares: "I have always betrayed my wife. Not with casual lovers but only with myself. By luring her into this trap, a life with me. I lured her and detained her there."

Botho Strauß describes the dark side of sensibility. He leads us through the subterranean channels of consciousness where thoughts and impressions are bred that rise slowly but surely to the surface, changing our perspective of the world without us being able to define precisely how it happens. One question remains after this nocturnal journey: "What would our mind have to offer our intellect without recalling the close-ups of the night?"


"Strauß's powers of vision are matched by few others." (Joachim Kaiser, Süddeutsche Zeitung)