Every year, forest fires come for the area around Bad Heim, a former spa town where Iris runs the hotel that has run in her family for generations. She monitors the forecasts and holds onto the knowledge that the fires shouldn’t be able to jump the river—or at least, it never has—as she and the other residents wait for rain to come and end the fire season. It isn’t yet over when a woman and child arrive asking for a room, hedging any questions about where they came from, what their names are, or why they’re here.
In Eternal Summer, Franziska Gänsler (her story translated from German into English by Imogen Taylor) captures the many cycles we’re trapped in. Each summer, the fires come. Each summer, the rain seems to come later. Each summer, all Iris can do is wait. So she ignores the disaster as much as she can, minding her hotel despite few guests, and chatting with her neighbor, Baby, who knew her grandfather once.
Now, she and the guests, mother Dori and daughter Ilya, soon settle into their own routine. But it’s disrupted by an ominous call from a man hunting for Dori. The nervous woman is fleeing a toxic relationship, manipulative and emotionally abusive. She went to her late mother’s house to clean out the old apartment, and couldn’t bring herself to go back, instead bustling her young daughter onto a train and fleeing to a place she’d read about only in poetry.
The cycle is disrupted, but the reader, and Iris, wonder how long it will last. Ilya wanders, Dori suffers periods of intense insomnia. Dori reflects on whether she is a fit mother, whether her husband’s allegations that she is not are true. She knows that while she can’t stand to be under his boot anymore, that his doctor’s salary, good home, and knowledge are good for their daughter. And she knows that he won’t give up until he’s found them and brought them back.
There’s an element of relatable despair that infects both characters, Iris and Dori, and that many readers will be able to connect with in our current world of seemingly unending climate disasters. Inaction caused so much of what we’re seeing now, and inaction can freeze us again. Humans, as the old adage goes, can get used to just about anything. Dori stayed years in an unbearable situation because she couldn’t see a way out. Iris would argue that she’s fine, and even if she wasn’t, she couldn’t afford to move, to leave, and so she stays, ignoring the fire licking at the hotel doorstep.
It takes a conversation with a pair of young, bold climate activists, talking their intersectional language, and with their bold, resourceful neighbor, always trying to make connections between her neighbors, to disrupt their cycles. For a brief time, Dori and Ilya start to genuinely imagine what an alternative future could look like.
Gänsler and Taylor capture not only the feeling of those never-ending cycles, of our fears and our attempts to keep them at bay, but also what may keep us in them: our fear of hoping, yearning. The novel’s results seem to imply that trying, pushing against these cycles, is to take a dangerous chance, is to enter yourself into risk that could be intensely more damaging than simply staying put. In a world of catastrophe, it’s impossible to imagine another disappointment.
Eternal Summer doesn’t present a solution so much as a suggestion around the edges. Confronting the youth of the activists and the solid truths of their elders, Dori and Iris are able to find possibilities lurking. Seeing the way neighbors look out for each other and communities come together, Iris sees new life in her day-to-day quest for survival. And while a wholesale transformation may not arrive, their cycles have been disrupted by even taking a moment to imagine the possibilities—by allowing their minds to see options they couldn’t before.
FICTION
Written by Franziska Gänsler
Translated by Imogen Taylor
Other Press
Published on May 6, 2025
