Reviews
"The Munich author Gerhard Köpf (Piranesi's Dream) is a master storyteller. In his new novel, too, Nurmi or The Journey to the Trout, he proves to be a shrewd and virtuoso sorcerer of language. The narrator in the novel sketches from his memory the vivid portrait of his uncle -- called Nurmi by everyone because in his youth he competed against the famous long-distance runner, and was, of course, beaten. Actually, Uncle Nurmi is a retired professor of medicine, a passionate fisherman, and above all a likably old-fashioned eccentric. On an adventurous journey to the trout streams of Finland he acquaints his nephew, who has just suffered the first pangs of love, with a melancholy philosophy of losing. Only at the end of the book does it turn out -- in a somewhat unwieldy, stuck-on resolution -- that in this way the doctor comes to terms not only with his defeat in sport, but also with a perilous love affair during the Nazi years. Laconically and vividly Köpf tells the story of a moving friendship. Quite unobtrusively he shows how people are marked by the passage of time, how personal destinies unfold their effects across generations. MUNICH TAGESZEITUNG