Pompeii. Or: The Five Speeches of Jowna
A distant mirror, separated from us by time, in which we nonetheless recognise ourselves
We are just below Vesuvius. More precisely – it is 79 AD, and we are in the rich, dissolute colonial city of Pompeii. Dead birds are found along the ridge of the volcano.
At a meeting with bird conservationists, the Pannonian immigrant Jowna voices his feelings that something bad is about to happen, and that they should just pick up and run. Despite his lack of schooling, money, and infl uence, Jowna somehow ends up as the head of a disreputable group of nonconformists.
And the nonconformists are successful; soon the town governor Fabius Rufus begins to believe that the volcano could indeed harm Pompeii. But when the nouveau riche Polybius takes an interest in the project, and the powerful Livia Numistria intervenes, Jowna is, bit by bit, forced to change his mind.
»Mr. Ruge’s novel is a pulsing, vibrant, thrillingly alive work, full of formal inventiveness, remarkable empathy and, above all, mordant and insightful wit.« – New York Times on ‘In Times of Decreasing Light’ (2013)
- Eugen Ruge’s Pompeii has comic features, even more so as the story turns out to be a spellbinding fable of our modern times
- A captivating and brilliantly narrated story about rise and fall, about veracity and lies
- For readers of Robert Seethaler and Cormac McCarthy
Eugen Ruge
Eugen Ruge was born in 1954 in Soswa, in Western Siberia, and came to East Berlin with his parents in 1956. After studying Mathematics, he worked at the Central Institute for Geophysics at the GDR Academy of Sciences from 1980 to 1985. He then began to write, at first mainly plays and radio plays. In early 1989, he fled to the Federal Republic. In 2011 he published the novel ‘In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts’ (‘In Times of Decreasing Light’), which won the Döblin Prize, the German Book Prize, and the Aspekte Literature Prize. He later published ‘Cabo de Gata’, ‘Follower’ and, in 2019, the novel ‘Metropol’. He shares his time between Berlin and the island of Rügen.
.jpg?ts=1788776406 "Eugen Ruge")