It is such a deeply melancholic and heartbreaking book. The writing is beautiful, but what stayed with me most was the way it portrays love, longing and loss. There is something incredibly tender about the relationship at the heart of this story, the silences, the stolen moments, the feeling of having found something precious in the middle of a world that might take it away. And then the ending 😭 I somehow expected it but still was not prepared for it. This book left me with that strange, aching feeling of mourning something beautiful simply because it could never last. -> There is his absence like a wound, an amputation, the outward sign of something incomplete which can never be made whole. That is the greatest loss. If I think of this as a game of pitch and toss, I can never win more than I have lost. -> I carry my dead with me. I take him on this journey from which I will not return except perhaps in death. -> It is a suit of armour made of paper, an imaginary shield. Our love is silk, it won’t stop bullets here. We must be careful it does not become my shroud. -> for whom do you write? You say: one writes for only a few. I write for my dead.

Ein absolutes Highlight! Besson erzählt die Geschichte des jungen Vincent der in den 1916er Jahren die gesellschaftliche Elite Frankreichs kennenlernt und nebenbei eine Welterschütternde Liebe lebt, deren Ausgang an Tragik kaum zu überbieten ist. Sanfte Sprache zeichnet weiche Linien durch das Buch und trägt mich gegen Ende hin auf meinen Tränen zur letzten Seite.