Recommendations
There are never only Ubiger's own pages on the desk. On top: The Emotional Power of Space by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine. It all began with this book. Full of pencil marks and highlighter.
Then the films by Bêka and Lemoine. In Koolhaas Houselife, the housekeeper leads us with bucket and mop through a famous house in Bordeaux. In Moriyama-San, a man in Tokyo lives among small white cubes. Together they are his house. And a conversation in Venice between the two of them, Jacques Herzog and Tatiana Bilbao. More than an hour long. On YouTube.
Next to them, a picture book about London lies open. A book about atmospheres. A bird guide to Pembrokeshire with dog-eared pages. Some books provide facts. Others a question. A whole chapter hangs on it.
And then the rooms and landscapes themselves. The Welsh coast. The streets of London. The journeys in Molly. The travels to Central America and southern Africa. They stand on no shelf. Rooms. Landscapes. Light. Atmospheres. They have fascinated Ubiger since childhood. Above all the Pantheon in Rome. Ubiger has been there twice. Light falls through a round opening in the dome and moves across the floor. Without all of this, the novels would not exist. These are the books behind the books.
Books
Fresh Water for Flowers
Valérie Perrin · translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle · Europa Editions · ISBN 978-1-78770-311-7
Violette Toussaint keeps a cemetery in a village in Burgundy. She knows the graves, the visitors, the flowers. Then a police inspector arrives with his mother's ashes. She wanted to lie in the grave of a man no one knew about. Told in flashbacks.
Friends of Dorothy
Sandi Toksvig · Virago · 2024 · ISBN 978-0-349-01900-0
Amber and Stevie buy a house in London. The previous owner refuses to move out. Dorothy, eighty and quick-witted, sits on her old red sofa and stays. A novel about the family you choose.
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger · Penguin · ISBN 978-0-241-95042-5
Holden Caulfield is thrown out of school and drifts through New York for three days. He wonders where the ducks in Central Park go in winter. He loves the Museum of Natural History because nothing there ever changes. His little brother Allie is dead.
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro · Faber · ISBN 978-0-571-25824-6
Stevens is the butler at Darlington Hall. All his life he serves the same house. He turns away the careful advances of the housekeeper, Miss Kenton. Years later he drives to see her. What he feels, he never says.
The Garden Against Time
Olivia Laing · Picador · 2024 · ISBN 978-1-5290-6667-8
Olivia Laing buys a house with an overgrown walled garden in Suffolk. She brings it back. Alongside, she tells the history of gardens as images of paradise. And asks who a garden is for.
Darkness Visible
William Styron · Vintage · ISBN 978-0-09-928557-1
Styron describes his own depression. From the inside. Brief.
Films
Perfect Days
Film by Wim Wenders · 2023
Hirayama cleans public toilets in Tokyo. Every morning the same movements. At midday he photographs the light in the same trees. He barely speaks of his past.
Art
Interior, Strandgade 30
Vilhelm Hammershøi · painting, 1901 · Städel Museum, Frankfurt
Rooms in Copenhagen. Grey walls, white doors, little furniture. Often a woman with her back to us. Not a sound.
Automat
Edward Hopper · painting, 1927 · Des Moines Art Center
A woman alone at a round table in an automat. Hat, coat, one glove off. A cup in front of her. Behind her a black window and a row of lamps.
Theaters
Hiroshi Sugimoto · photographic series, from 1976
Empty cinemas. Each photograph is exposed for as long as the whole film lasts. What remains is a white screen. Time as an image.
Architecture
Palmengarten
Frankfurt am Main · founded 1868 · opened 1871
Founded with the winter gardens of Duke Adolph of Nassau. The Palm House, damaged in the war, reopened in 1999. In the Tropicarium, ten climate zones under glass. Warm, humid air. Benches along the paths. This is where The Left End of the Bench is set.