Jörn von Holten: Jaron and the Laughing Wind, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

Wooden huts on wheels stand at the borders of the kingdoms. Inside sit inspectors, sliding patterned ribbons beneath magnifying glasses and matching faces against the weave. Those who fit are let through. Those who do not face a two-day march back. Jaron, fifteen, can read every face an inspector wishes to see. Nuria, fourteen, cannot - at least, not whilst anyone is watching. When her patterned ribbon is declared illegible, she is left with eleven days before her existence is decided by official decree.

Together with the old light-cutter Joram, who sits atop a borrowed cart refusing to say where he is headed, and the border-post clerk Külp, whose exit ledger has sat empty for nine years, they journey across the land between the kingdoms. Out there, there is no jurisdiction. And for that precise reason, it holds absolutely everything.

About the Book Jaron and the Laughing Wind is a literary parable in the tradition of Kafka, Calvino, and Ishiguro - yet infused with a warmth and dry humour seldom found in dystopian fiction. This is not a novel about a system that breaks people. It tells of something far more dangerous: a system that seeps so deeply into our perception that its categories masquerade as the very properties of reality. And it explores what happens when someone laughs without first checking whether laughter is permitted.

Who It Is For For readers of Kafka, Borges, and Kazuo Ishiguro. For anyone who grasps bureaucracy not merely as a backdrop, but as an ontology. For those who wonder what algorithmic classification, automated administration, and simulated empathy are doing to our sense of self. For readers who can stomach comedy alongside death, and who appreciate tenderness stripped of sentimentality. Neither Young Adult fiction nor a standard genre novel: this is literary prose with a philosophical depth of field, and a humour that catches in the throat.

Tone and Language Precise, understated, laconic. The sentences are brief, the dialogue sparse. The comedy stems from the chasm between what a human being needs, and what a form has to offer them. The novel does not explain its philosophy. It simply lets it happen.