Lesung - "Hohle Räume" von Nora Schramm

In the organizer's words:

Reading and discussion with Nora Schramm

Nora Schramm reads from her debut novel "Hollow Spaces"

Moderation: Sophia Bahl

As always, we open our bar!

The novel: When Helene visits her parents shortly before Christmas, the rooms of the familiar house seem strangely hollow, as if they cannot be filled with life despite her best efforts. The reason for her visit is her parents' divorce. Irritated, the daughter observes their every move, dissects them with wit and breaks them down into their individual parts, which come together to form a bourgeois family picture: Thomas, the father, is a doctor, but because he doesn't like human bodies, he prefers to advise a pharmaceutical company. The mother, Irene, studied to be a teacher, but after the birth of their only daughter, she made home and hearth her field of work. And Helene herself is a successful artist with solo exhibitions in London and Copenhagen, an assistant and a gallery owner. Now she is supposed to help them sort out their possessions as well as the emotional baggage of forty years of marriage. But then her mother falls down the stairs, breaks her hip and suddenly her childhood friend Molly, who was thought to have disappeared, reappears. 7

With humour and strong images, Hohle Räume tells of the family no longer as a place of psychological abysses, but as the smallest possible social unit, in which the baby boomers' history of advancement is just as recognizable as their children's class advancement - and where sofas, pots and shutters are not just everyday objects, but subtly provide information about values, convictions and certainties.

Nora Schramm, born in 1993 in the Southern Palatinate, studied foreign languages and cultural studies in Giessen and theories and practices of professional writing in Cologne. "Hollow Spaces" is her first novel.