Today we would like to introduce you to the two gentlemen who are passionately run Potsdams "Literaturladen".
Dear Carsten, dear Felix, why did you choose to run a bookshop?
Carsten: Because I’m intoxicated with love of literature, a crazy literature aficionado.
Felix: Because life without reading is bland and tedious. I want to understand what living is meant to be about – but I need emotional and intellectual bridges.
Please describe the final few meters of the route you take in the mornings to your bookshop.
Carsten: My way to work – that’s 20 seconds, the most important of the day, that’s when I feel the thrill thinking of what‘s ahead, the thrill of encounters with books, with customers.
Felix: It’s when I concentrate on what will happen. When I’ve read the first 50 pages. What lingers can often be anger, more often excitement. Messing about with books is always a joy.
Throughout the day ...
When the shop-door opens and someone steps inside...
Carsten: Expectations – what‘s next, maybe a splendid moment, speaking with someone, maybe just a message ....
Felix: Some kind of conversation, friendly, enjoyable – at best, a heart-to-heart talk about literature. Reading together, sharing each other’s curiosity – we claim to do this.
What is the wonderful thing that happens when we read?
Carsten: You become immersed in other worlds, sense what the lives of others can be like.
Many say they don’t have the time to read. What can they do about that?
Carsten: Question themselves, what are their priorities, since the notion [of not reading] wouldn’t occur to you if you can do nothing else but ...
Has a Norwegian book given you a reading experience that you remember with pleasure?
Carsten: Knausgård, for the knausgårdian in-your-face, radical subjectivity.
Felix: Suffering in Karl Ove Knausgård‘s Min Kamp, existential reading in Tomas Espedal‘s Gehen oder die Kunst, ein wildes und poetisches Leben zu führen, pleasure in Jon Fosses Morgen und Abend.
Translated from the German by Anna Paterson
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