At the 21st International Book Fair in Thessaloniki next week, the Goethe Institute and Deutsche Welle present the author Denise Ode and her book “Different Light”.

In the pink backpacks the moms bought in their little girls at the beginning of the school year they were written in round white letters, such as Anna, Julia, Sabrina, Sandra or Sofia. But there were no backpacks that write the heroine’s name in the novel by German writer Deniz Ode Districted Light issued in 2020 by Suhrkamp.

So the little one realizes for the first time the differences in the society where it lives. Grows in a Polichni next to a Industrial parkwhere her own drunken father works by diving aluminum plates into the acids.

Her mother has come from Turkey, from a village on the Black Sea coast, stumbles on dad’s explosions, taking care of his grandfather slowly losing his light. The heroine returns to her hometown years later for the marriage of her childhood friends, wisdom and Pika, and with constant interference in the past she tells her story, a largely predetermined adventure of the depressing family environment and the unexpected education system.

He will not be promoted to high school, go to the night school later, will eventually cover the lost time, finish high school and study. All this in a climate of anxiety, silence, inner exile, miscarriage from the great whole.

The writer Deniz Ode

Writer Deniz Ode was born in 1988 in Zidlingen, Frankfurt by a Turkish father and a German mother, next to Höchst’s industrial park. He studied Philology in Leipzig where he lives to this day.

Its Protolio pervasive light, a novel of emotional education written with particular sensitivity, immediately caught the attention and was awarded. In Greek she released a fine translation by Maria and Angelos Angelidis by Gutenberg. And now Deniz Ode will be presented at the 21st International Book Fair in Thessaloniki on Saturday.

Recently at Book report Leipzig appeared with the booklet free associations on the concept of secret, included in the relevant series of Droschl editions with playful essays. Meanwhile last year she had released her second novel entitled that I am sleeping that is already translated into Greek.

The new heroine, Yasmine, again in a degraded suburb, falls in love with a neighborhood dude, Vito, and passes all the tests of violence and humiliation. Underage works of Atete are undoubtedly raising current social issues, the exhilarating of the different or the unmistakable submission to violence, but they approach them without complaints and declarations, from a low and human point of view, with exhaustive descriptions and remarkable ability to create a dense atmosphere.

Like when the heroine in the pervasive light realizes: “I was not a foam. I was not born in the foam of the waves, but in the dust; in the smoke, in the sodium chloride of the air, sitting on the roofs of the cars. I was born in the sour extract of rubbish burning in the dump, muddy grasslets by the river, between the trees and pillars and pillars of the current, through the black water that licked the pebbles and the stones on the acropotamia, in the acropotamia.