Jan Weiler: Maria, ihm schmeckt’s nicht!
This could quite possibly be the ideal read for a holiday in Italy – and now a film too.
Jan Weiler marries into a huge Italian family from Molise, the smallest of the Italian provinces. His anecdotes of German-Italian encounters and misunderstandings are unfailingly amusing and narrated with a lovley playful ironic tone. They would have palled after a while but for the moving account of his father-in-law’s youth and arrival in Germany as a Gastarbeiter in the fifties, when he met with mistrust and outright prejudice. This experience goes a long way to explaining his other-worldliness. He retreats into a fictional world of his own as a way of coping with the paradox of belonging neither to the country he has made his home nor the country of his birth. Highly entertaining!
No comments:
Post a Comment