The true seed of Stalker was not a theory or a plan. It was my daily bus rides across Berlin. From the first stop, always in the same seat, I would watch people get on and off: strangers with gray coats, the cold glow of their phone screens, the silence of routines. That was what pushed me to write the Novel “Stalker”
One passage in the novel describes that sensation:
“From the seat I have made mine, every day I decipher the obsessive uniformity of gray coats and the dim light of mobile phone screens on people’s faces. My constancy is such that I register the exact instant when every morning the woman with the leather briefcase looks up at the clock tower as she enters the town hall. I follow her movements, searching for protagonists of stories I never wrote and probably never will.”
That image — the act of observing strangers and inventing possible lives — slowly grew into Stalker. But the way I shaped the story owes everything to the writers who pushed me forward.
Nabokov and the Voice of Obsession
From Vladimir Nabokov, especially Lolita, I learned how a voice can hypnotize, how obsession itself can be the engine of a story.
Saramago and Collective Blindness
From José Saramago, in Blindness, I absorbed the lesson that a novel can be allegory and survival story at once, where humanity is stripped to its limits.
García Márquez and the Porous Real
From Gabriel García Márquez, in all his work, I inherited the idea that reality is porous, that myth and memory can break into the everyday at any moment.
Bringing It All Together
The Berlin bus rides gave me the images. These three authors gave me the language to turn those images into a literary thriller. Without them, Stalker would not exist.
