Inger-Maria Mahlke - A szigetek

"It's July 9, 2015, fourteen hours and two or three languid minutes in La Laguna, the old capital of the islands, the air temperature is 29.1 degrees, at 17:27 it reaches the highest daytime temperature of 31.3 degrees. The sky is clear , cloudless, so light blue that it almost looks white." Our story begins with this. And with Rosa, Ana and Felipe's daughter, who has dropped out of her fine arts studies and is returning to Tenerife, the somewhat rundown residence of the once influential Bernadotte family. He's looking for something he might find in the city's old people's home, where 90-year-old Julio is still the doorman.

In Nagy's family novel, the author tells a private history. The location is the Canary Islands on the edge of Europe. History in a nutshell, because in the final scene of the novel, the Tenerife gentlemen's company drinks to the future in the villa of the banana and tomato merchant Theobaldo Moore, which we get to know in the first chapter from 2015, and almost a century has passed in the meantime. The plot of the film rewinds, leading us in a meandering way between the turning points of Spanish history, which sometimes only emerge, but which determine the entire lives of the flesh and blood characters, the civil war, the long-lasting Franco dictatorship, and then the era of democracy finally arriving.

Inger-Maria Mahlke's (1977) novel The Islands won the prestigious German Book Award in 2018 based on the decision of a jury of critics.