WORLD:
“The setting of your new novel“ Fallmeisters ”is post-apocalyptic: the climate catastrophe has occurred;
Europe has disintegrated into a patchwork of micro-states at war with one another;
powerful water syndicates rule the world.
To say that you are pessimistic about the future would be an understatement.
Are you an apocalyptist?
Christoph Ransmayr:
Absolutely not. Or better: I try to see the incidence of light even when I am locked in a box. Of course, there are currently many indications that larger political entities could disintegrate if, for example, the idiocy of the nation state is further sanctified and cultivated. But the world of the “fall master” is neither a prognosis nor a warning based on analyzed political reality. This story is a mind game. In psychoanalysis one speaks of a “day remainder”, which appears again as a fragment in the dream. This short novel has more to do with a dream than with the construct of a dystopia developed from the historical present.