Author: Kiev Stingl
Publisher: Moloko Plus
Year: 2020
Size: 190 x 130 x 4 mm
Pages: 48, perfect bound
Language: German
Photos: Kiev Stingl
Pencil drawings: Mantalina Psoma
Cover: originally poster art for Carol Reed’s film ‘Outcast of the Islands’
Design: Ralph Gabriel
Postage & packing not included
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
from: Edgar Allan Poe – A Dream within a Dream
Kiev Stingl’s Mandalina – Der Verdammte der Insel is a story about loss, about a love that consumed itself in a passionate fire. Divided into four chapters named after the four seasons, Stingl’s main character and alter ego Gandolfo describes how his love affair with the young artist Mandalina sprouts, blooms, withers and dies as in an inevitable and natural cycle. The story, set in Berlin and on a Greek island, is rich in metaphor and simile and Stingl’s original word choice and sense of rhythm and sound make this brief tale a prose poem or rather a song about love meant to die. A fugitive song by the ‘damned of the island’, who weeps and weeps as he watches grains of golden sand slowly slip through his fingers.
Kiev Stingl was born in 1943 in Aussig a.d. Elbe in Sudetenland, from which he and his mother had to flee after the end of World War II. After having first having found refuge in Mannheim he was relocated to Hamburg in 1949, where he attended secondary school and unsuccessfully studied Politicology and Ethnology. In 1985 he moved from Hamburg to Berlin. Since 1975 he has been active as a composer, lyricist, singer, actor and performer and has authored four acclaimed LPs (Teuflisch, Hart wie Mozart, Ich wünsch den Deutschen alles Gute and Grausam das Gold und jubelnd die Pest) and four books (Flacker in der Pfote, Die besoffene Schlägerei, Kainer Maria Cowboy and Sink skin) and many other unpublished and unreleased works. His intoxicated and provocative behaviour, his existentialist stance paired with outstanding qualities as a song writer and lyricist make it fair to compare Kiev Stingl with his French counterpart Serge Gainsbourg.