FLYPAPER – Miscellaneous Notes

“You don’t love because, you love despite.”

Following his much-admired style study Die Schlange im Wolfspelz, Michael Maar has now produced a slim and very private collection of notes, observations, aphorisms, anecdotes and short pieces of prose about all the things that seemed book-worthy to him over the years.

Maar writes about music and metaphysics, prophetic dreams, a floating glass, blue ticks on WhatsApp and how they would have tortured Proust; of women in Chekhov, train station YouPorn under Lenin, Wolfgang Pauli’s deadly problem with the number 137, Joseph Roth’s pocket watch, Stifter’s infertility, Fichte who casually drops his coat at Goethe’s, Doctorow’s Ragtime as a Kleist thriller, the puzzle of cosmology; the sweet habits of living, reading, loving, growing old and thinking.

"The beauty of Maar's prose miniatures is that they briefly shake up the status quo. There is no doubt that the invented is always preferable to the real." Süddeutsche Zeitung