A gentle and cheerful book that will open your eye to the world with literary finesse.
Out of thin air is the tenth book Eleonore Frey published at Droschl and also her most cheerful one.
Helen Schnee, the story’s heroine virtually falls onto the writer’s desk, which marks the beginning of a close-knit relationship between the two of them. Helen Schnee, as most characters in Frey’s books only loosely bound to bourgeois reality, tries to gain foothold in this new world and eventually ends up at ›Open Ear‹ – a kind of helpline, an organization that could however also turn out to be something completely different.
However, it is not only work that defines the bourgeois individual, their dwelling and marital status are just as important – and therefore, Helen Schnee is given a place to stay as well as social contacts. The circumstances do not meet her expectations, though, and with the consent of the author, she breaks free again and goes on to live her floaty life somewhere else – but keeps her interest and empathy for the people that have crossed her path.
»Eleonore Frey’s prose counters the world of established identities, of facts and figures and stone-cast certainties with gentle skepticism and unwavering commitment to all those who have lost their footing or never gained a foothold in reality in the first place.
That literature is made up of words and phrases is common knowledge, as is the fact that it is rather ›manufactured‹ than ›created‹. It is ever so rare, however, that a writer grants this much of an insight into her way of working and is credited with ›sublime attentiveness and subtle empathy‹.« (by the jury of the Swiss Book Award).