Der beste Platz der Welt

Felicitas Hoppe's books are always about travel. With "The Best Place in the World," the author reaches her destination. But what destination? And how does she get there? Through a tunnel, as frightening as the one in the fairy tale of the land of milk and honey. In the fairy tale that Felicitas Hoppe tells here, it opens directly at the walls of a church on a plateau above the Rhône. At a place that is both unreal and real, where much wine grows and where an old, but freshly restored hermitage is located: "To be a hermit means to find a place, a spot, a location."

What is now told in that alpine landscape full of southern light, however, is not a story of staying, but the sparkling core of an autobiography of an author who cannot be trusted, as she invents myths and fates in her books by weaving together fairy tales and histories – a restless impostor in search of truth. With "The Best Place in the World," Felicitas Hoppe reinvents herself, as she recounts her time as a laureate of the Spycher Literature Prize, subtly stepping into the line of her inventions, alongside her knights and saints, her criminals and failures, and all the other unreliable guides of world history. Ultimately, she reaches out her hand to a man with whom she tests how to conquer summits.

A wonderful cabinet and magic trick, both revealing and concealing at the same time, that shows us how to bottle sunshine and that we will never be the first, because the hermit has always been there before us.