**Elmiger's breakout novel is a staring contest with History: an effort
to map the resonances and frictions introduced to the world by the sugar
industry. But can any writing project contain such devastation?
**
The narrator of Out of the Sugar Factory, Dorothee Elmiger, is a
writer and archivist--and possibly a hoarder--of objects and stories
that speak to the profound impact of the sugar industry on the world.
Seated in the room where her vast collection sprawls across the floor,
she obsessively connects a violent global industry to our unsettled
present and her own desires. Elmiger's deeply researched and innovative
novel brings together subjects as varied as Karl Marx, Chantal Akerman,
the Haitian Revolution, and the institutionalization of Ellen West to
uncover the vast network of entrenched relationships lurking just below
the surface. Out of the Sugar Factory, in Megan Ewing's matchless
translation from German, is a prismatic account of a writer's
overwhelming need to tell a story that is true, to follow the sugar
wherever it may lead.