Die Inseln über dem Winde

For one summer, Lafcadio Hearn travels from island to island as a passenger on a steamship in the Lesser Antilles. Back in New York, he processes his notes into a travelogue of exotic sensuality, into a word painting of intense luminosity. With a striking sense for colors, shapes and smells, with the amazed curiosity of a lover and the precise gaze of a journalist, he tries to capture every detail in language. Again and again he delights in describing the slightest differences in the ever-same landscape and everyday life in the tropics. At the same time, he always keeps an eye on the social conditions, the people and their peculiarities, their habits and customs: It is a world of flourishing decline after a long and sorrowful history of colonial dislocation. Hearn wants to preserve what he sees because he knows that.