Inka Parei’s third novel again looks back at German history through the eyes of its characters. In a race against time, a man has to find out whether his ex-wife was contaminated by fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. He revisits and questions his own memories of working in the chilling ‘cold centre’ —the air-conditioning plant for the East German party newspaper. Was he a cog at the heart of the system, did he fail to prevent a tragic accident, and can he find out exactly what happened back then before it’s too late?
Berlin, 2006: a man worked in the Neues Deutschland newspaper building in the 1980s and later left East Germany. One day he gets a call from his ex-wife. She’s in hospital, waiting for an exact cancer diagnosis. To help her, he returns to the city and tries to reconstruct the events of a few days in May 1986. Was a truck from the Ukraine that she came into contact with contaminated? And why does the death of a workmate for which he blamed himself now seem more doubtful than ever? Are the events back then the reason why he’s never really come to rest in life? He soon begins to lose control over his days in Berlin, entering into a desperate search for orientation over a fracture in his own life—one he has never got over.
Written in Parei’s characteristic precise prose, the novel is a timely reminder of how we react to accidents, nuclear and otherwise, and a bleakly realistic description of East Berlin before the Wall fell. But its tight and dizzying structure keeps readers on the edge of their seats as the narrator tries to solve his very own mystery.
