Vivir

A young man receives a call and hears some long-awaited and feared words: "We have an organ for you". Should he undergo the transplant this time? Determined, he takes his suitcase and an ambulance takes him to the Charité Hospital in Berlin. With humor, tenderness and carefree depth, Wagner shares the days and nights, which turn into months and seasons, that he spends in the hospital. It is his story and, of course, also that of his roommates. Lying in bed, that spaceship in which he travels through his memories and dreams, he attends the unusual parade of those with whom he shares his daily life, his concerns and his confessions: a beverage merchant with a secret lover or a Lebanese butcher who lost both brothers in the war. As he listens, he too recovers his own past, and his introspection is constantly interrupted by universal and intimate questions: what does it mean to be in the world? Who is worth living for? Who died so that he could stay alive, even though he is already like someone else? A torrent of thoughts, illusions and fears (and sometimes an irrepressible impulse to rebellion) that, in our hyperpragmatic and hyperrevolved universe, we barely allow to surface. But the protagonist of this book has "all the time in the world", a time that often passes with the only company of a tree, his tree, which, imperturbable and at the same time changing, greets him from the garden every morning. As international critics have pointed out, David Wagner, with impeccable prose, is one of the few authors who knows how to unleash the "stream of conscience" in such an intelligent, moving and honest way.