Bilder deiner großen Liebe

A girl stands in the courtyard of a mental institution. The gate opens, the girl hurries out and begins a journey that leads her through forests, fields, villages and along the motorway. “The stars wander, and so do I.” The girl’s name is Isa, and Isa is going to meet people. Friendly, strange, bad and sorrowful people. A sailor working on inland lakes and rivers who might be a bank robber, a strange novelist, a man in a cemetery. On a rubbish tip she meets two boys on the run in a stolen car. She takes a liking to one of them.

As enchanting as she is unpredictable, Isa, introduced to us through an unforgettable appearance in Herrndorf’s novel Tschick, is the subject of his last – fragmentary and incomplete – novel Pictures Of Your Big Love. “One gets the impression that this book is peerless in contemporary German literature, that it is, perhaps, unique. So damaged, sick and wrong on the one hand, especially in its dialogues, yet so full of poetry, beauty, grief, charisma, comedy and a sense of being cloaked in dreams on the other.” (Der Tagesspiegel)