An announcement rattled out of the loudspeaker: Attention, all newly deceased people on lines 3 and 18 please go to station D. Your bus will leave in a few minutes.”
Just in time, ten-year-old Holly ran across the street, furious at her mother, ignoring the van hitting her. To her great horror, she suddenly finds herself in a huge hall. In the incredible throng of people and animals looking for their buses, she speaks to Frida, a strange girl who has been wandering around here for 100 years, and explains to her what awaits her now.
Micha Lewinsky uses his experience as a screenwriter and filmmaker in his debut “Holly im Himmel” and his imagination seems to know no bounds between heaven and earth. All of the departed are transported in buses to their rooms, beyond which is the world they desired on earth and will now live in here in heaven for all eternity. Holly and Frida watch as the passengers exit the bus, the old lady is greeted by her friends, and a polar bear and an Inuit go missing in the Arctic.
Using a kind of literary montage technique, the author alternates between heaven and earth in his scenes
But whether Holly’s wish that she meets both her parents behind her door, who had separated, and stupid Uwe, her mother’s friend who has disappeared again, should come true? She begins to think and wants to return to earth, but for this she must become an angel – Frida explains to her – and first attend angel school. The dramatic part of the story tells why this is difficult, with some realistic satirical references to current problems on earth. Because the dictator Bortel rules in heaven, who brutally ensures order and obedience and soon hunts down the two children.
Using a kind of literary montage technique, the author alternates between heaven and earth in his scenes, because Frida and Holly, best friends after some difficulties, end up on earth with the help of an angelic resistance group. Not to be recognized as an old married couple who are now being taken in by Holly’s family. Which, of course, gets Holly in trouble with her childish desires as supposed adults. This often ends in comedy, because both worlds are connected with slapstick and humor, with tension and surprise, and the narrator brings himself in when he asks questions and gives hints about the course of the story.
It gets more and more turbulent until it ends with a cinematic showdown, in heaven and on earth, in which the dictator is incapacitated with a frying pan wielded by a resistance angel. But before that, the author gives Holly the opportunity to help her mother and brother mourn her death. “I would be very happy if the book comforts, if it gives courage. And maybe that would be wonderful if it makes you want to live,” said Micha Lewinsky in an interview. (from 10 years)
Micha Lewinsky: Holly in Heaven. Illustrated by Lawrence Grimm. Diogenes 2022. 208 pages, 14 euros. (Release date 24.8.)