“The strawberries are sweating.” What an opening sentence for a novel told from the end! Because you think you know the end. Fact or fiction? A woman is on her way to a funeral with a basket full of strawberries. It’s humid in Paris, she takes the metro, line 7, far out to the Cimetière de Thiais, where death doesn’t cost as much as in the city. Final stop for someone who was born at the last stop of the Habsburg Empire before the Russian border. Joseph Roth, he drank himself to death in exile.
Lea Singer’s novel “The Drinker’s Saint” – Munich
