Fiction
November 2022
Not Out Of this World
by Anne Köhler
If someone offered you a place to hide out from your life, would you take it? Linda, Friederike, and Valentin move into a peculiar hotel and get the opportunity to change their lives A magnificently told, tragicomic, and hope-giving novel about how terrible and how wonderful life can be all at once An Invitation to Disappear Hempel has no dreams. No, really. Unlike most people, he’s reasonably content and there’s nothing in particular that he’d wish for his life. So everything would be great if it weren’t for his girlfriend Elfie, who’s obsessed with her own dreams: “Don’t dream about what your life could be, live your dream,” is her motto, emblazoned on her living room wall in gold script. So Hempel invents his own dream for Elfie: running the New York marathon. But when Elfie enters him into the race and he is accepted, he’s got a problem. Friederike has everything she could wish for: she’s a successful professor, she has a great husband and, at the age of forty, she’s just become a mother. Everyone around her thinks she must be on top of the world – but it’s quite the opposite, and she wishes she could disappear out of her life forever. One day, Hempel and Friederike are presented with precisely this opportunity: to disappear for a time and leave everything behind them – in a hotel that doesn’t host tourists but people who have lost their footing. They can stay as long as they like, take some time out, think their lives over until it all becomes clear. But when Hempel and Friederike meet Linda, who has an extreme fear of heights, and Valentin, the owner of the hotel, any notion of peace or care goes out the window... ‘Not Out Of The World’ tells a story about the loneliness at the heart of people, about lies and unspoken truths, and about many different kinds of disappearing. Anne Köhler employs plenty of imagination and humour to expose the unfathomable and the absurd in the everyday and reveals people with deep-seated insecurity in our supposedly secure modern western world.
