The Journey

We travel, we hunt, we search without finding anything. We‘re tourists. We dive into strange places, surf across decaying surfaces, and we desolate the planet with ourselves. Western tourism is the continuation of colonialism by other means. All the characters in Sibylle Berg‘s travel novel are driven by something. They fly restlessly to exotic places, looking for sex. Or meaning. Or just a change of scene.

We meet Peter, an old hippy who owns a hotel and almost drowns in a tsunami, Miki, an adventurer who ends up in the lm industry, and Parul from Bangladesh, who hammers stone all day to nance her family‘s hut in the slums.

In The Journey, in which Berg‘s style finds its consummation, the fates of her characters come together in the most exotic places around the whole world. A story that ends nowhere except in the loneliness of western tourism.