Kirsten Reinhardt Elvis Gursinski und der Grabstein ohne Namen
[Elvis Gursinski and the Ghost Society]

Elvis Gursinski und der Grabstein ohne Namen (‘Elvis Gursinski and the nameless gravestone’): both the title and the cover picture of Kirsten Reinhardt’s new children’s book whet our appetite and draw us in to a story bursting with comedy, creativity and magic, rounded off with a touch of the Gothic, while at the same time the author sticks to the same themes that preoccupied her in her previous books: family, friendship, the experience of alienation, and exceptional events that pose a challenge to children and put them to the test.

Elvis lives with his mother in the spookily dilapidated former gardener’s house in a closed cemetery in Berlin’s Wedding district. The rent is low, and to make up for that the family are required to look after the pathways and ancient graves, but this made Elvis’s father so depressed that he upped and left. Elvis’s mother is an illustrator with hallucinatory tendencies who is mostly immersed in her work and rarely inclined to indulge in conversation. In consequence, Elvis is solely responsible throughout the long summer holidays for keeping the cemetery neat and tidy.

Thin as a rake and unforthcoming, the boy is an outsider at school, but in the cemetery he is fully in his element. He adores the morbid atmosphere and broken gravestones; having a gift for telepathy he can talk to the dead or at any rate their ghosts. But then one day Dalia suddenly explodes into his private world: noisy, strong and self-confident, she is the grand-daughter of Madame al Nour, a sorceress. The two children are like chalk and cheese, but once it has begun there is no stopping their secret and magical adventure together, which culminates in a wonderful friendship amidst a unusual extended family.

The strange cast surrounding the two independently minded children and their magic-oriented relatives is complemented by a talking fur-collar, a chattering squirrel, and a large number of highly vivacious dead denizens of the cemetery. And although the surreal ending of this children’s novel in a spooky burial vault is distinctly over the top, the story as a whole works well with its mixture of jokiness and gravity, its playful use of the fantastical, and its gestures at authenticity and verisimilitude – especially through the use of real street names, which precisely locate the entire action.

All of this is heightened by a veritable firework display of whimsical dialogue and amusing linguistic games, along with tender evocations of feelings and inner states. Any child will readily recognize itself in Elvis, who feels ‘out of place’ in the everyday world – sometimes lonely, often overburdened, and always a bit of an outsider. An outsider not simply because his parents are different from the norm, but also because his melancholy father is Turkish and has never come properly to terms with his lot as an immigrant.

But there’s one thing that Baba Gursinki is brilliant at, and that’s telling stories like the ones in the Arabian Nights – stories that stir the emotions and fire the imagination. And that is probably Kirsten Reinhardt’s main intention: to offer children a story that is both funny and sad, and which, by virtue of floating somewhere between the real and the magical, sparks their imagination and dissolves the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, between fact and fiction. Stories, whether found or invented, are the very stuff of life.
Once the slightly overdone mayhem of the novel’s conclusion has faded away, the reader is left with a number of smart and subtle apothegms, such as ‘We don’t find our challenges, our challenges find us’ (an insight as telling in life as it is in literature), or ‘There’s love enough for everyone’ – another insight of universal validity; and not least the paradox that strength can sometimes entail showing ‘weakness’, since it is only weakness that makes us capable of empathy. A more appealing underlying theme for a children’s book can scarcely be imagined; that, too, has universal validity.