Words and texts in conversation – about life and writing and the unforced affinity of love and self-love.
"You have to dismiss the words," the writer noted down, or: "I am as transparent as an empty jam jar." Once again, Martin Walser compiles impressions of the world in text and poetry in which his way of seeing things is often immersive, and his perception of a water surface, a lily or a treetop is a way of thinking about these things. Alissa Walser’s watercolours correspond with this reflection; by digressing into the sensual, they allude to the scenic sources. They prime the author’s words with the spectrum of seasonal colours.
The themes found on these few pages are many and varied. Martin Walser began writing almost 80 years ago, and he still does what he did then; he records his own states of mind as if they were finite, while trying to stay open at the same time. His themes are: being someone one isn’t; sentences that one wanted to say and didn’t; texts that one wanted to write and didn’t; contention and love. Conversations with one’s own knee or with a cat. And then the main motif: that it might all soon be over.
The writer is gearing himself up, preparing, but also says: "I’m not fighting it, I am attentive and want to live to the last evening."
