“Verkin” by David Wagner
The author David Wagner becomes from his last novel Verkin read.
Verkin is around seventy, Turkish and Armenian, cosmopolitan, entrepreneur, politician. David is in his mid-forties, a writer from Berlin, grew up on the Rhine. The two walk through Istanbul, travel across Anatolia, to the Lycian coast, to Lake Van near the Iranian border. Verkin talks about her childhood on the Bosporus, about her grandmothers who survived the genocide in 1915. From the father who built Turkey's largest electrical company. About Swiss boarding school years, Paris 1968 and lucrative GDR businesses in divided Berlin. From famous New York artistic circles in the seventies, from their husbands, including a German. About an accident that sent her on a ten-year odyssey. About her fight for the Armenian cause and her political work in the AKP. From a country, from a life full of contradictions.
Verkin is a fascinating search for clues between Orient and Occident, a story about storytelling and a novel about a great, unusual friendship.
David Wagner, born in 1971, made her debut with the novel “My Midnight Blue Pants.” This was followed by the collection of stories “Was alles fehlt”, the prose book “Speaks the Child”, the essay collections “What color has Berlin” and “Mauer Park”, the childhood memories “Drüben und Drüben” (with Jochen Schmidt), the novel “Four Apples”, which was longlisted for the German Book Prize, and “A Room in the Hotel.” In 2013, he was awarded for his book “Leben” awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, in 2014 he received the Kranichstein Literature Prize and was the first “Friedrich-Dürrenmatt Visiting Professor of World Literature” at the University of Bern. “The Forgetful Giant” won him the Bavarian Book Prize and a shortlisted position for the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize in 2019. His books have been translated into many languages. He lives in Berlin.