Bloodbook
by Kim de l'Horizon
Description
A Book to Shake Perceptions and Certitudes – a Book that Will Change You
The book’s unnamed protagonist, who feels neither male nor female, is prompted by their grandmother’s slide into dementia to investigate their family history. The more their grandmother forgets, the more the narrator tries to remember: what was it in their childhood that prompted them to feel so alienated from their body? Does it have something to do with the family’s hushed-up history of incest? Why is their grandmother struggling to differentiate between herself and her sister who died young? And what happened to their youngest great aunt who disappeared when she was young?
Tracking down answers to these questions proves difficult because the family has a habit of keeping quiet about such matters. At the heart of it all is the question of self-determination: how to exist when your own body is never a given, but is instead constantly having to be negotiated?
Singular in its style and form, Bloodbook deals with our intangible heritage, the things we carry without being asked: stories, genders, identities, trauma, languages, class affiliations. Kim de l’Horizon searches for other kinds of knowledge and traditions, other stories and ways of becoming: feminist, witchy, bought with blood, and those that leave a hole in their wake. De l’Horizon leaves the linear, monotonous form of family stories behind and opts for a fluid, streaming form of writing which softens instead of pinning down.
More Information
Marketing Information
Longlist German Book Prize 2022
Jürgen Ponto Foundation Literature Prize 2022
Reviews
„A debut hard to be exceeded (…) A book of superpowers, of superheroines. It comes with a saving grace. (…) This debut could move people like the great confessional texts by Édouard Louis, Annie Ernaux, Daniel Schreiber or Hanya Yanagihara did recently.“
The Jury of the Jürgen Ponto Foundation Literature Prize
„A touching, literarily opulent, utterly fascinating book!“
Stephanie Metzger, BAYERISCHER RUNDFUNK
"'Blutbuch' surprises and amazes again and again through the mutability of language, the play with forms and text flows, and above all through the clever and witty narrative style, which in the end arranges all the seemingly contradictory building blocks into one big, impressive And." Judith Hoffmann, Ö1 KULTUR AKTUELL
Author Biography
Kim de l’Horizon, born in 1992 in Switzerland, studied German, film and theatre studies in Zurich and literary writing in Biel. They are currently completing a Master’s in Transdisciplinarism at ZHkD. They are a member of the e0b0ff collective and the editorial board of the literary magazine delirium. For the 21/22 season, they are author in residence at Bern City Theatre. Kim has won the Jürgen Ponto Foundation Literature Prize in 2022 which is also longlisted for the German Book Prize 2022. Kim de l’Horizon previously has been awarded numerous prizes more including the Treibhaus & OpenNet competitions in conjunction with the Solothurner Literaturtage for Prose, and has been published in various literary magazines. They are a beneficiary of the Ernst-Göhner Foundation Fund for artists in education.
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DuMont Buchverlag GmbH & Co.KG
DuMont Buchverlag publish international and German literary and upmarket commercial fiction, crime fiction, general non-fiction, biographies and cultural history as well as art, design, living and cookery.
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher DuMont Buchverlag
- Publication Date July 2022
- Orginal LanguageGerman
- ISBN/Identifier 9783832182083 / 3832182083
- Publication Country or regionGermany
- FormatHardback
- Primary Price 24 EUR
- Pages334
- ReadershipGeneral
- Publish StatusPublished
- Original Language TitleBlutbuch
- Original Language AuthorsGerman
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