The World at My Back

It begins with a loss. The loss of books, many, many books, an entire library. How a writer might manage to lose all of his books – this and much more is subject of Thomas Melle’s novel The World at My Back. It is the chronicle of a bipolar disorder, the captivating and breathtaking manifesto of a writing self. Melle's novel is a literary force, poetic, highly comic, dramatic and precise.
Life in a frenzy, as a party, as a superstar with flights of fancy, illusions of omnipotence before the fall into the abyss, into silence, emptiness and nothingness ... Then, very slowly, a quiet, timid new beginning. The mania transforms into depression, then a phase of normality and back into mania ... The writing doesn't pause either – it tries relentlessly to find words for what is happening, to get a hold of the monstrosity, to put it into perspective. Thomas Melle tells the story of the fragility of an ego that has nowhere to settle between self-constitution, memory and erasure. Here, of course, Arno Schmidt should not be left out: „The world of art and fantasy is the real one, the rest is a nightmare.“