Jo Lendle:

In the novel "Die Kosmonautin" ("The Cosmonaut"), the heroine embarks on a journey to a place that is not quite of this world. This applies not only to her distant, intangible destination – the moon – but also to the spaceport where she waits for her mission to begin. A place like this, a place for passing through and saying farewell, must have a somewhat moony character itself - as a foretaste and place of transition. Also, at the time of the novel Hella Bruns is somewhat "moonstruck" herself.
And so there are no names, no specifications. I decided to invent the settings of my novel and to retrace my heroine's steps after I finished writing it. But where to? Hella was silent about her itinerary. All I knew was that it was a placeless place – whatever that means. And I had two clues that helped me pinpoint the places at least approximately. Spaceports are built fairly close to the equator to make the most of the momentum of the earth's rotation. And they are built in isolated places because of the danger of crashes. Isolation sounded good to me.
So what was more natural than to choose the central Asian edges of the crumbling Soviet Union? The novel is set in the near future, but reads as though the action took place long ago. Such time warps are easy to find in post-socialist areas. Here, in the Kazakh steppe, lies the world's most important spaceport. And this was my destination. Although located in Kazakhstan today, Baikonur is a Russian enclave and a prohibited military zone. Eventually I had all the permits I needed and planned to join a German aerospace delegation that wanted to watch a rocket launch. The launch kept being delayed for another month. After a year's wait I had finished the novel and wanted to set out.
So I flew on my own to Almaty, the old capital city. I had no idea what to do. I roamed the streets for a day and, that evening, took a cable car up the mountain to look at the view. At the top I struck up a conversation with a Baptist preacher who had just returned home after five years of missionary work.
He took me with him. On a 24-hour train ride through immobile landscapes, all the way to the new, pretentious capital city of Astana, to his parents. We took the car to a former kolkhoz by the Siberian border, where friends of his live. (In the evening we tried to catch their cow; I walked out into the steppe for a few hours.) We went rowing on the loveliest mountain lake in Kazakhstan. There was a policeman behind every tree because the president was due to visit next day. Of course we talked about God all the time, from different perspectives. All these things intermingled, congealed together in little balls such as the wind blows through the steppe. Some of them are now blowing through the novel. It is not set in Kazakhstan – but Kazakhstan is set in the novel.

Jo Lendle, Die Kosmonautin, novel, 192 pages, hardcover, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich, February 2008, € 16,95 [D] | € 17,50 [A] | SFr 30,90 (UVP)
ISBN 978-3-421-04343-6