The days that I spent with God
The days that I spent with God is a book by the author and journalist Axel Hacke , published in 2016 by Verlag Antje Kunstmann . From a first-person perspective, it tells conversations and experiences that a Munich man has with God . The illustrations for the book are by Michael Sowa .
content
During his lunch break, a man is suddenly pushed off the park bench by an elderly man. This saves his life, as a few moments later a globe is thrown out of a window and hits the park bench. This event brought the two men into conversation. The elderly gentleman shows his skills on various walks through Munich; So he lets a stone lion sculpture jump through a burning tire at the Feldherrnhalle or clouds emerge from nowhere. This makes it clear to the man that his companion is God. He tells of the Big Bang , of other worlds that he has created, but also of self-doubts that gnaw on him, and of the loneliness he has experienced over the millennia. The man keeps the philosophical conversations and the bizarre events to himself, since he suspects that his family will not believe him. Especially since he has been seeing an approx. 25 cm tall “office elephant” for several years, but nobody else notices it. God notices that the man is still mourning his deceased father because he has not wound his watch since he died. God grants the man a look at his father and throws him the old watch. When the man and God later sit in a café, the latter creates a new world with the help of a conductor's baton. Satisfied with this, God says goodbye to the man. The "office elephant" grabs the baton with his trunk and gives it to the man. He puts it in the place in the office where his father's clock was previously.
criticism
“The book is somewhat reminiscent of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's 'The Little Prince'. Dream worlds are opened up and at the same time the last and most important things in life are spoken of with apparent naivety "
“God admits his greatest mistake: that human life begins with birth, leads to an ever greater accumulation of knowledge, ability, feeling, tenderness and wit - and is then brutally extinguished. An idiocy, he admits. (...) That could sound banal in terms of life support, but in Axel Hacke's fantastic world of images, beautifully imagined by Michael Sowa, the visit of the creator to his creation appears above all human and charming. "
literature
- Axel Hacke, Michael Sowa: The days that I spent with God . Verlag Antje Kunstmann, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-95614-118-8 .