"But every good path must be an open path and a straight path and lie in the sun, and be without mire, without swamp and without will-o'-the-wisp. What matters is truth, what matters is reliability and honesty" 
- Theodor Fontane, Irrungen, Wirrungen

Yandè Seck | Weiße Wolken | Kiepenheuer&Witsch | 352 pages | 23 EUR

Yandé Seck very quickly makes it clear which social milieu her debut will focus on. From three perspectives, she tells of a Germany that would previously have been described as middle-class. One sister, Dieo, already has children and is about to join the practice of an elderly colleague as a psychoanalyst; Zazie, the younger sister, is still at university and works in a youth centre - she is critical of her older sister for her middle-class life with the overly conformist Simon, who is involved in a financial start-up and barely has time for the children and his wife. Seck enriches this narrative thread with the usual stereotypes that you'd expect from a middle-aged, white man from this social class, be it in dialogues about crypto chat, coaching experiences and even a short ChatGPT excursion to explore his own biography.

This reads almost a little too much like a good thing and would not be particularly interesting, were it not for the fact that Seck's sisters share a biographical detail that both changes their relationship to each other and to German reality: they have a Sengalese father and thus an immigrant background. Which is never the easiest thing in Germany or indeed anywhere else in the world and is actually always interesting.

And you quickly realise that Seck knows what she is writing about. She herself has an immigrant background, two children and works as a psychotherapist for children and young people in Offenbach near Frankfurt, where she grew up.

Her novel is therefore also a book about Frankfurt; every café, every street, the university, her everyday life with the children and that of Simon, all of this is based on reality and is brought to life through long passages of dialogue. Since White Clouds is, from the outset, about conflict, the reality of relationships, belonging and identity, these almost screenplay-like, cinematic passages are reminiscent of early Woody Allen films or the furious, emotional dialogue from the films of young female directors such as Emma Seligman (Shiva Baby, 2020) or Maryam Keshavarz (The Persian Version, 2022), who also address their experience of culture clash, search for identity and coming-of-age dramas.

Mithu Sanyal | Identitti | Hanser | 432 Seiten | 22 EUR

But more than these films, Seck's debut is reminiscent of Mithu Sanyal's Identitti, a novel also set in the intellectual arena of a university and where, like Seck, people suffer from the narratives of their everyday lives and therefore always have difficulty with the formula for a simple life, i.e. we are all human beings in the end, no matter what our skin colour. 

Like Sanyal's, Seck's novel is always a little theatrical in conception, due, of course, to the woke environment that she depicts. But Seck manages to balance this theorisation of her plot with merciless descriptions of everyday family life or by embellishing the beginnings of Zazie's new relationship with everyday occurrences in order to give the novel its credibility -  essentially, the search for some kind of solution to the morass of internalized and socially imposed narratives so that finally, by the end, comes the feeling of "belonging".

This catharsis is reached relatively late in White Clouds , a good two thirds through the novel. And as in many other stories from Germany with this subject matter, it is the death of the father that brings about the turning point. This was the case in the very precise and tender film Ivie wie Ivie, about two Afro-German sisters in Leipzig, and of course in Fatma Aydemir's dark and dense family epic Dschinns.

Fatma Aydemir | Dschinns | Hanser | 368 Seiten | 24 EUR

Unlike in Dschinns, Seck's father's death does not reveal the family's inner turmoil, but instead, heals it, leading to a new surge of identity, clarity, empathy and understanding. It is the occasion for a profound catharsis, because something that Simon had already posed as a question finally becomes clear: white clouds have nothing to do with being white.