The Angel Snare

Olga Martynova’s new novel is about love. It’s about the love between the ageing writer Caspar Waidegger and his young girlfriend Laura, who is writing her dissertation about his books. It’s about the question how free or how trapped we really are, and about Waidegger’s disabled daughter. It’s about family and responsibility, and about what is normal and what is insane. It’s also about our past and how it reaches into our present. It’s about an actress whose daughter is murdered by euthanasia-driven doctors. Thus it’s also about guilt. And it’s about angels who look down upon us horror-stricken by our cruelty, who are mystified by how we act and yet are unable to protect us.
In short, this new novel, written with an incredible lightness of touch, is about everything. And because everything would mean nothing without literature, that's also what this is about: the wonder of storytelling.