Out of the Sugar Factory

by Dorothee Elmiger, Megan Ewing (Translator)

Overview

The narrator of Out of the Sugar Factory, Dorothee Elimger, is a writer, archivist—and possibly a hoarder—of objects and stories that speak to the profound impact of the sugar industry on the world. Seated in the room where her vast collection sprawls across the floor, she obsessively connects a violent global industry to our unsettled present. In this deeply researched and stylistically innovative novel, subjects as varied as the institutionalization of Ellen West, the Haitian Revolution, the films of Chantal Akerman, and Karl Marx’s Capital come together to reveal a vast network of entrenched relationships.

 

As Elmiger ventures deeper and deeper into her material, blurring the lines between author and her fictional counterpart all along the way, she travels from French communes to Swiss sanatoriums, from upstate New York to a strip mall in Philadelphia. Every realization becomes a site of excavation. Old histories fall away. Newly unearthed truths glimmer and shriek. The work of a scholar and flâneuse who eventually finds herself as entangled as her subjects, Out of the Sugar Factory, in Megan Ewing’s matchless translation from German, is a prismatic account of a writer’s overwhelming need to tell a story that is true, to follow the sugar wherever it may lead

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949641417
Publisher:	Two Lines Press
Publication date:	05/09/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	731 KB

About the Author

Dorothee Elmiger was born in 1985 and lived and works in Zurich. Her debut novel Einladung an die Waghalsigen was published in 2010, followed by the novel Schlafgänger in 2014. Her texts have been translated into different languages and adapted for the stage. Dorothee Elmiger has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Aspects Literature Prize for the best German-language prose debut, the Rauris Literature Prize, a sabbatical from the city of Zurich, the Erich Fried Prize and the Swiss Literature Prize.

Read an Excerpt

I enter the space where things are temporarily stored, this hypothetical repository, like I would enter the Italian churches and chapels around noon now and then to seek refuge from the heat: short visit, a quick walk through the opulent, obscure aisles that nobody seemed to take notice of.

I let my hands slide across surfaces, touch everything there is.

To Laura at the canteen: In truth I'm not up to anything besides sitting around and reading these days.

Editorial Reviews

Shortlisted for the German Book Prize
Nominated for the Swiss Book Prize

“This is a novel obsessed not with sugar but with abjection, uncertainty, creative groping, provisionality, desire and pleasure.…[The narrator’s] research uncovers the link between production and oppression; her notebook, however, comprises ‘dark whirlpools, in which everything, including everything peripheral, swirls with deafening noise forever around an unstable center.…The sugar factory is perhaps her own turbulent mind.” —On the Seawall

“A fascinating perspective on the workings of global capitalism…The book’s dot-joining approach might seem strange or avant-garde; but there’s nothing all that odd about Out of the Sugar Factory. If anything, Elmiger has found a way to describe something fundamental that gets overlooked, both because it’s so ingrained that it passes unnoticed and because you literally can’t see it.” —review31

“This book has a way of dissolving into and altering your thoughts, much like sugar in coffee.…the text echoes the way we think and remember, the ways we make connections between disparate objects in order to at least approach understanding.” —Asymptote

“Out of the Sugar Factory is an incredibly compelling quest for meaning and companionship through borrowed stories, unorthodox biographies, parallel lives. Weaving her own experiences—and fictions—with those of the unreliable narrators of history, Elmiger builds a narrative that is more than the sum of its parts. The book is hungry, insatiable actually, approaching what she calls "boundlessness"...it probes the limits of individual life and expands what can be done with language, driven by the kind of illogic that gets us closest to truth. This is mysticism for today.” —Elvia Wilk, author of Death by Landscape 

“Out of the Sugar Factory is W. G. Sebald meets Agatha Christie, with a remarkable touch all Elmiger's own. One of Switzerland's most promising young writers reminds us that history itself is one great, sordid mystery that must be continually reinvestigated, even if it can't be solved."  —Jessi Jezewska Stevens, author of The Visitors

“Out of the Sugar Factory is liberated from the corset of the novel, a celebration of storytelling, a daring expedition into the economy of power and desire and into the abysses of our collective phantasms. Elmiger is a poet, historian, analyst, theorist, and gifted storyteller all in one. Few books are are beautiful, as intelligent, as profound and playful, and on top of that, as brilliantly written as Out of the Sugar Factory.” —Martina Süess, WOZ

“It is already clear that Out of the Sugar Factory will be one of this year’s most important books. This is because it delves into pressing issues, but deals with them in a hallucinatory way. And because of the precision and luminous beauty of her language.” —Annie-Sophie Scholl, Die Zeit

From the Publisher