It is with an email from one Emmi Rothner for cancelling a subscription that ‘Love Virtually’ by Daniel Glattauer (www.landmarkonthenet.com), opens. Translated from the German by Katharina Bielenberg and Jamie Bulloch, the story that unfolds is of the mail landing at a wrong address, with @leike.com instead of @like.com, presumably.
Nine months later, when Leo Leike receives Rothner’s ‘Merry Christmas’ message, the response is simple: “We don’t know each other in the slightest but I’d like to thank you for your…” To that, Emmi writes, “You seem to have slipped into my contacts list by accident – a few months ago I was trying to cancel a subscription and inadvertently got hold of your email address. I’ll delete you straightaway.”
Some time later, the original problem remaining unsolved, Emmi resumes her efforts to cancel the subscription, only to find the mail reaching Leike again. He wonders, “Are you doing this on purpose?” Emmi is seriously embarrassed. “Unfortunately I have this chronic ‘ei’ problem, or rather an ‘e’ before ‘i’ problem. If I’m typing quickly, and I’m trying to type ‘i’, somehow I always manage to slip in an ‘e’ before it,” she rues.
But, why so? “It’s as if the tips of my two middle fingers are fighting over the keys. The left one is always trying to be that bit quicker than the right. The fact is, I was born left-handed and made to write with my right at school. My left hand hasn’t forgiven me to this day. It keeps tapping out an ‘e’ with the middle finger before the right hand can type an ‘i’.”
A few mails later, you read about how Leike guesses that Emmi would have taken no longer than twenty seconds to write the ‘ei’ mail, because he thinks that her emails seem to effervesce. “I could have sworn that you were a fast talker and typist, a bubbly individual who cannot go about her daily business quickly enough. When I read your emails I can’t detect any pauses. Both their tone and tempo seem to be bursting with energy – breathless, zippy, even a touch excited. Your written style is not that of somebody with low blood pressure…” reads his diagnosis.
A book that can make you miss your plane, watch out.
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