Everything Is Still Possible Here
Hier ist noch alles möglich

Molinari Cover
Aufbau Verlage
June 2018 / 192pp
Fiction

This book is outside of the five-year window for guaranteed assistance with English language translation. We suggest getting in touch with the relevant funding body for an informal conversation about the possibility of support. Please refer to to our  recommendations page for books that are currently covered by our funding guarantee.

Sample Translation here
by Katy Derbyshire

review

A wolf has been sighted in the grounds of a factory. Will it return and what will the consequences be for the people who work there? Molinari’s finely-tuned and strangely compelling novel is a literary delight.

The cardboard box factory is soon to be closed down and its few remaining workers, including a cook, the director, a machine operator and a guard, are caught up in thoughts of finality: the last pans of soup, the last forklift consignment of boxes, the last repairs, the last goodbyes. The novel’s narrator is a young woman, a night-guard in this place where there is precious little to guard or to see.

The wolf has not been seen again, but the dramatic possibility of its return shapes the narrative. The narrator and her fellow night-guard, Clemens, are asked to dig a trap in case the wolf comes back. The narrator sleeps on the premises by choice, cut off from the town nearby, and with only the monitors and her Universal Encyclopaedia for company much of the time. She jots down her musings on fences and islands, barriers and limits, her observations on natural history and wide-ranging flights of fancy triggered by the few sparks of conversation around her. Alongside the possible existence of the wolf, she is fascinated by the story of Lose, a machine operator who has found a new job at the airport nearby. The airport becomes a place full of possibilities in the narrator’s imagination. She recalls how Lose once saw a man drop from the sky from his viewpoint inside a bird hide, a man the police presumed had hidden himself in the wiring beneath the belly of a plane and frozen to death. This is the imaginative landscape inhabited by the novel, where the reader is invited to linger awhile, in a literary world that quietly draws us in.

Molinari’s impeccable writing style and delightfully quirky trains of thought animate the novel. Everything Is Still Possible Here raises questions about the borders and limits we place on our everyday lives. Molinari’s is a voice that makes us sit up and take note of the unsettling but endlessly interesting margins of our experience.

press quotes

‘Molinari writes so tightly, so precisely, that in a few strokes she can depict one
of the greatest dramas of our age.’

– TagesWoche

about the author

Gianna Molinari was born in Basel in 1988 and lives in Zurich. She studied creative writing at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel and modern German literature at the University of Lausanne. Since 2015, she has been working as a programming assistant for the Solothurn Literature Days. In 2017 she won the 3sat Prize at the Festival of German-Language Literature in Klagenfurt for an extract from her debut novel.

rights information

Aufbau Verlag (Germany)

Inka Ihmels

ihmels@aufbau-verlag.de
Tel: +49 (0)30 28394123
www.aufbau-verlag.de

translation assistance

Pro Helvetia covers up to 100% of the effective translation costs for literary works by Swiss authors.

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