Anja Kampmann Book order

This "gorgeously written" National Book Award finalist is a dazzling, heart-rending story of an oil rig worker whose closest friend goes missing, plunging him into isolation and forcing him to confront his past (NPR, One of the Best Books of the Year). One night aboard an oil drilling platform in the Atlantic, Waclaw returns to his cabin to find that his bunkmate and companion, Mátyás, has gone missing. A search of the rig confirms his fear that Mátyás has fallen into the sea. Grief-stricken, he embarks on an epic emotional and physical journey that takes him to Morocco, to Budapest and Mátyás's hometown in Hungary, to Malta, Italy, and finally to the mining town of his childhood in Germany. Waclaw's encounters along the way with other lost and yearning souls—Mátyás's angry, grieving half-sister; lonely rig workers on shore leave; a truck driver who watches the world change from his driver's seat—bring us closer to his origins while also revealing the problems of a globalized economy dependent on waning natural resources. High as the Waters Rise is a stirring exploration of male intimacy, the nature of memory and grief, and the cost of freedom—the story of a man who stands at the margins of a society from which he has profited little, though its functioning depends on his labor.

It is first and foremost the inner coherence of Frank Berendt's work that attests to a continuous, often despairing search for a form capable of pointing, like a hint of missing, towards the beauty of a world of images that is in the process of dissolving. [...] What [his] work most notably illustrates is the way the artist's work has revolved around a central question over a period of more than twenty years: he seems to have committed himself to the paradox of a living immobility; he attempts to capture precisely the sensuality, the tangibility, of a dissolving image. In paintings and videos he works with the impossibility of, on the one hand, an image which is frozen: motion solidified, and on the other, with the desire to hold onto fleeting beauty." (Anja Kampmann). 0Exhibition: Angermuseum Erfurt, Germany (28.9.-30.11.2013).