Cornelia Funke tells stories of fairies and mud monsters, of adventurous girls, a gang of children in Venice ? and her stories somewhere between fantasy and adventure are Germany?s most successful literary export at the moment....
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"The soil here is sandy. Perfect." He shielded his eyes against the sun and pointed at the thick green fringe on the edge of his land. "Over there you have to fight the jungle every day. Weeds everywhere. But here, nothing will grow."
"Isn't that bad?"
"No, no." He smiled. "Nothing will grow here unless you want it to. It is easier to tend to things if there is only one thing to do." He was a man with a mathematical mind. He liked numbers and efficiency. A modern farmer, an agriculturist. Except for this one bare patch of white sand, his land was meticulously planted with remarkably uniform trim coconut palms. His neighbours' plots were full of ungainly, stunted, wavering trees, profuse undergrowth and a general sense of impending chaos. "You see, the people over there have too much water. They think they are lucky to have a natural spring. But the water goes everywhere and everything is constantly growing. So to grow your own plants is a battle. You have to take out as much as you put in. Look at the mathematics: subtract as well as add. Much easier if all you have to do is add."
He explained his latest plan. "I will grow papaws here with drip irrigation." He took me across to an excavation site. "This is my reservoir, designed to save rainwater. It will not be wasted. From here the precise amount we want will be distributed to each fruit tree exactly when it is required. It will be controlled for maximum yield." He tapped his head with a small bent finger. "If you know what you are doing, everything becomes possible. Even a desert can bloom."
He was right. His papaws were excellent; the yield enormous. People for miles around marvelled at his extraordinary orchard. No one had seen anything like it. When I next visited him I saw the reservoir. A small sea with cormorants lazing on the water. The fruit trees stood like soldiers who had never had to fight, perfectly regimented for ceremonial duties, delivering beautifully formed papaws bang on time. "You see, you just have to add the right amount of water."
Then, last month, I found him in Colombo looking unusually glum. "What's wrong?" I asked "Sums no good?"
"I've had to scrap it."
"Papaw trouble?"
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Water trouble. It is always the water."
"But you have the reservoir for water ..."
"It's the rain. It doesn't come when it is supposed to, and when it does come it doesn't stop. You used to be able to set your calendar, even your watch, by the rain those days. Now you have no idea what is going on. It is totally unpredictable. We put the drip on one day, and the next minute it pours. The reservoir overflows. Everything becomes waterlogged. The fruit rots. If we get rid of the water, release it into the fields, we end up with a drought. I can't work it out. I can't grow anything any more."
"Nothing?"
"Someone somewhere has buggered up the system. I can't do it just on hope and a prayer."
"Then what?"
"We have to find some way of subtracting, instead of adding, to get back to some equilibrium." He looked up. "We have to fix the sky." Then he stared at me as if it was up to me.
*
The story, written in English, originally appeared in German in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on March 17, 2007.
Romesh Gunesekera was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1954, and now lives in London. He is author of "Reef", "Heaven's Edge" and most recently, "The Match."
RSS
The headlines were stolen by Charlotte Roche's moist little sex shocker and Jonathan Littell's sprawling SS fantasies but only two books united the critics: one is good and the other, utterly objectionable. There was a flurry of interest in some fabulous comics and a resurgence of the political and the historical novel. A dip into the books published in Germany this spring.
The nonfiction books this spring look into life as a budding president, a kitchen slave, a prophet, a string quartet. They pick apart the world of the elites, of lust and taste and '68.
Travels through the dreams and nightmares of Europe, in a small land of great poets, torn between Balkan catastrophe and Brussels. A reportage on Croatia, this year's partner country at the Leipzig Book Fair. By Gregor Dotzauer 
An SS man reflects on mass murder - and there's a pigeon hole for every vile deed. Novelist Georg Klein on the Holocaust and the enlightened harmony of trivial realism in Jonathan Littell's novel "Les Bienveillantes" which has just been translated into German.
The 400-page German translation of Jonathan Littell's corpse-littered SS novel,"Les Bienveillantes," has put the German-language feuilletons into a critical frenzy, despite the general consensus that the book is bad. We have compiled a selection of the accusations hurled. 
Kurt von Hammerstein was head of the Reichswehr, a grand seigneur, and an implacable opponent of National Socialism. In his new book "Hammerstein oder Der Eigensinn" (Hammerstein or idiosycrasy), Hans Magnus Enzensberger engages in dialogues with the dead to deliver a literary and lunatic precipitate of German history.
This literary autumn belongs to two Russian writers: Vassily Grossmann and Varlam Shalamov, whose epic works have been published in German at long last. But older Germans and German Romantics, Polish queens, Romanian Mannerists, combative atheists, Neopolitan Camorristi, Catalonian knights and a glutton of glorious abandon have also come up trumps.
The literary event of the season is the inexplicably delayed publication of two Russian masterpieces: Vassily Grossmann's historic drama of the 20th century "Life and Fate" and Varlam Shalamov's collection of tales from Kolyma "Durch den Schnee". On the German side, we have seen older novelists flexing their muscles and reaching for the skies, biographers looking up to bygone giants, and the feuilletons rallying to defend religion against the air strikes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. 
The novel is blooming in the Urals, where the children of the former technology elite are letting their imaginations run riot. By Sonja Margolina
Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk's book "Dojczland" is a sophisticated portrait of German-Polish relations with flights of sarcasm and a fine sense of grotesque. Doused heavily in bourbon, it's a controversial bestseller in Poland. By Thomas Urban
Romanian literature is still a tiny niche in the German book
market. Mircea Cartarescu's latest novel to be published here,
"Die Wissenden," shows readers what they are missing. A visit to
Bucharest to meet the man who is probably Romania's most famous author. By Jörg Plath
Come cruising in the park they say is dead. In his
biography of Stefan George, Thomas Karlauf reveals the charismatic German poet's authoritarian practices and the homoerotic core of his work. By Alexander Cammann
Rüdiger Safranski has pulled off the improbable: his book on Romanticism is a genuinely exciting account of German intellectual history. By Ulrich Greiner
Germany's book market is being flooded this autumn by biographies of dead male writers. Ina Hartwig examines the whys, wherefores and potential pitfalls of this latest literary craze.
The German Book Prize 2007, an annual award for the best German language novel, has been awarded to Julia Franck. Read an English excerpt of her book, "Lady Midday", and of the other five on the shortlist.