The Weather Fifteen Years Ago

The Weather Fifteen Years Ago is no conventional narrative. The reader must infer a sensational love story that the author hasn’t actually written, but which his fictional persona describes to a contentious interviewer. This narrative grips the reader as they argue about the mysterious plot.

The real Haas plays several mind-games at once, for the love story begins with an exquisite kiss between the protagonists who have known each other since childhood. The reader must deduce the mysterious relationships, which zigzag erotically through several characters and two generations. At the core of all this is a sophisticated web of scientific and poetic weather lore.

The prosaic romantic hero, Vittorio Kowalski possesses a strange talent: he can remember the weather for every day of the past fifteen years in a certain village in the Austrian Alps. When he is invited to display this uncanny ability on a TV game show, he uncovers memories of his unrequited love for an Austrian girl named Anni, the accident that led to her father's death, and his own near-fatal experience at the place of their secret childhood meetings. As the interview progresses, intricacies of the children’s parents’ stories unfold to reveal a startling erotic entanglement. On the very last day of the fictional transcription, we learn almost everything else.

Wolf Haas, author of the bestselling Detective Brenner mystery series, has won the Austrian Radio Play of the Year Award (1999 and 2000), the 2000 German Thriller Prize, and the 2004 Literature Prize of the City of Vienna. The Weather Fifteen Years Ago received the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize of the City of Braunschweig. The author lives in Vienna.

Stephani Gilardi is a 2007 graduate of Wellesley College. She lives in New York City.
Thomas S. Hansen is Professor of German Language and Literature at Wellesley College.