Release: 18.04.2023

Sample Translations

LIFE IS A TRANSIENT CONDITION

Sample Translations

  • Life, death and what lies between. Gabriele von Arnim writes about the ten years following her husband’s stroke.
  • "They really do exist, these seconds that change your entire life, that rob you of all certainty and leave you staring emptily into a future you don’t understand."
  • 90,000 copies sold!
  • English sample translation available.

 

 In this brilliantly written account, Gabriele von Arnim writes dramatically, intimately and laconically about living with and in her husband’s condition, telling the story of a life ravaged, of dying and loneliness. 

After her husband’s two strokes, Gabriele von Arnim spent ten years living with him and his disability. It is not his brain’s speech centre, but his articulation centre that has been affected. He can find the right words, but they sound like small exploding firecrackers. And then the sentences just hang in the air. In this literary text, the well-known journalist and author describes the fine line between caring and encroachment, affection and bossiness. When do attempts to help end in humiliating degradation? When does self-sacrifice become merciless? How do you balance out being in the disability as well as being in life? Life is a Transient Condition is a passionate narrative, as cool as it is tender, of a beleaguered life. 

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China - Common Master Press

  • Publisher: Rowohlt Taschenbuch
  • Release: 18.04.2023
  • 240 pages
  • ISBN: 978-3-499-00634-0
Cover Download Das Leben ist ein vorübergehender Zustand
Das Leben ist ein vorübergehender Zustand

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Ralf Hiemisch

Gabriele von Arnim

Gabriele von Arnim was born in Hamburg in 1946. She studied, completed her doctorate and spent ten years working in New York as a freelance journalist. She writes reviews for newspapers and radio, presents readings, has published several books and lives in Berlin.