Summary
Guy Helminger: Tomorrow has already happened
Troma Luiza dreams on the sofa about a trip to New Zealand; her husband Felcer, a taxi driver with a choleric temperament, has five battered canvas giraffes as his favorite customers. Their marriage could be called somewhat happy. Longings float in the distance, everyday life stubbornly clings to the here and now, and a quiet discomfort creeps through life together. An unknown man sits intimately with Luiza on the sofa. After a ride in Felcer's taxi, he disappears.
With this ordinary, young couple in the center, Gi Helminger creates a social panorama that goes back to the post-war era: the way Louise's and Felcer's parents built their existence in Cologne in the 1950s, their happiness, their failures, all this influences the next generation and marks it, down to endearing habits or disturbing moodiness.
Gi Helminger weaves all the episodes of the novel into a dense web up to the moment when Felcer and Luiza are threatened by a family tragedy that stops the usual course of things: Tomorrow was already there.
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