And nothing ever ends
Novel
by Tomer, Gardi
In And Nothing Ever Ends, two artists from two different centuries travel through linguistic and cultural spaces. Experiences of foreignness, identity, life as an artist, and lots of politics are the major themes of the novel, in which the two storylines mirror each other. First, Tomer Gardi, written in German, sends himself as a literary character with the talking German shepherd Rex and the elf king or even Goethe’s Erlkönig at his side on a fantastic-adventurous odyssey, slapstick, funny and with many subliminal pinpricks. In the second part of the novel, translated from Hebrew, we follow the 19th century Indonesian painter Raden Saleh from Java through Europe and back to Asia—a historical novel and at the same time a reflection of our times.