Fiction by Francizca Gänsler translated by Imogen Taylor, reviewed by Jadyn Genest
ETERNAL SUMMER (Other Press)
“Although I could see the fire through the window, the situation in the forest eluded me.”
I aptly read Francizca Gänsler’s atmospheric debut novel in the middle of a heat wave that warranted emergency advisories. Outside, the temperature climbed until it eclipsed the 150-year-old record by four degrees. The entire city became a united front against the heat. Cooling centers were established for the homeless and elderly. Public health campaigns were held at the library. The cafe I work at discounted cold drinks and put out pitchers of ice water for non-patrons. Small talk about the weather circled. Like the characters in Eternal Summer, we all shared a similar awareness: this isn’t normal.
When the humidity finally broke, the anxiousness dissipated quickly. Normalcy felt close enough at hand. Customers sat outside on the patio again, enjoying the balmy breeze of a July morning, finding respite in shade. If not for this novel, I might have forgotten to be unsettled by this cycle of change and acceptance. Eternal Summer is a study in the tides of personal and ecological crisis—what it means to find stasis when the world is teetering on the edge of collapse, and what it means to foster trust, intimacy, and community in times of upheaval.
Gänsler’s novel, translated elegantly from German by Imogen Taylor, occupies a liminal space between crisis and complacency. Eternal Summer takes place in a fictional Bavarian spa town, Bad Heim, where Iris spends her thirties tending the once-picturesque hotel she inherited from her grandfather. It’s the near future when the novel opens, and Iris is mostly accustomed to the wildfires that consume the town’s border every year. A river separates the burning forest from town—a geographical and psychological boundary that keeps the fire, and the full weight of alarm, at bay. Iris spends her days in relative isolation—sweeping ash from the veranda, sunbathing with a mask on, and watching footage of her town on the news. “Like a piece in a board game, I kept an eye on developments, tending to the little square that was my life one move at a time. I played by the rules, I followed instructions, and so far there had been no need to leave.” Her world is held together by monotonous routines and an unspoken reliance on the illusion of distance from danger.
Doris, and her daughter Ilya, are enigmas to the few remaining residents of Bad Heim. Their unexpected arrival to the hotel—and utter lack of preparedness for the heat—forces Iris to confront the reality of the steadily-worsening situation in her home town. When Doris cannot procure identification for herself or Ilya, Iris assumes they are using fake names. Nevertheless, there is a burgeoning sense of trust and solidarity between them, even as Iris fields phone calls to the hotel from Doris’s husband. The relationship that develops between Iris and Doris is shaped by their setting: the blistering heat is a tangible proxy for the unspoken attraction simmering constantly in the subtext. Iris is drawn to Doris despite her volatility and erratic behavior. Their mutual desire is never openly expressed but pressurizes beneath the surface—oppressive yet restrained, obscured by smoke. Their charged connection is not just a catalyst for the unfolding events in the novel, but also a structural mirror to mounting environmental tensions as the fires escalate but never breach the river.
Gänsler applies these overlapping metaphors to understand how we live within prolonged, invisible catastrophes—not just climate crisis, but emotional estrangement, longing, grief, and abuse. Prior to Doris and Ilya’s arrival, Iris is a fixed point amidst a disintegrating landscape. She lives suspended between the static threat of climate change and her own tenuous grip on normalcy. Gänsler uses this atmosphere of stillness to explore a broader kind of moral and emotional complacency. Through Iris, we see how the proximity to crisis doesn’t always produce urgency, and how we grow used to unlivable circumstances in small, daily increments. Iris doesn’t just ignore the fire, she adapts to it—just as she adapts to loneliness, distance, and fear.
Throughout the book, the prose is cinematic and tightly-focused. Gänsler resists the spectacle of the fire itself. Instead, we witness the fire through its quietly accumulating effects on the landscape: “I remembered the river before the fires, when it was still clear—the sky reflected in the water, bright autumn leaves patterning the surface. Now, the surface was dull and dusty. Feathers and dark leaves floated motionless on a film of ash.” Recurrent natural imagery tethers the reader to the land’s slow devastation, anchoring the novel’s emotional weight in physical detail. For example, Iris inspects the same red maple tree every day for signs of blistering or drought damage. The tree serves as both a record of environmental damage and a reflection of Iris’s emotional interior: “Ash and embers were everywhere, and the leaves of the red maple had curled up like caterpillars, hard and black at the edges.”
In the novel’s final act, the subtlety of Gänsler’s elegant prose evaporates. The tensions which have been quietly escalating in the characters’ peripheries are brought to light. Likewise, the wildfires themselves become impossible to ignore: the climate activists are forced to leave their encampments, the bodies of dead starlings litter the hotel property, and Iris’s fragile routines begin to collapse. When the protestors take sudden refuge in the hotel, the isolation and blissful ignorance that defined Iris’s life are shattered. The hotel is a temporary shelter, filled with voices, shared meals, and mutual understanding. There is a seismic tonal shift as the wildfires peak and a sense of community is restored. The momentum of the fires carry the characters toward confrontation and toward a vision of a future where things could be different.
Then, finally, there is rainfall. The fires recede, the smoke lifts. The town, for now, is spared total destruction. And in the aftermath, the residents and guests of Bad Heim have decisions to make: the spell of stasis is broken.
Eternal Summer resists resolution. All that remains for Iris are the smoldering foundations of the cycles which at one point trapped her. Gänsler refuses to moralize or offer easy hope. She asks us to consider how we live amid disaster, and how we hold each other when the world is unrecognizable. In the end, I’m grateful to have read Eternal Summer during a stretch of record-breaking heat. It’s a novel that ultimately holds a mirror to the way crisis seeps into daily life, as Gänsler captures the dissonance of living through slow disaster. The novel doesn’t offer catharsis, nor does it sound an alarm. It lingers in the murky, liminal space where most of us already live—aware that something is wrong, yet unsure how or when to act. It seems to say: resignation is not the same as acceptance. Even when the rain comes, we’re still left with the question of what to do next.
Jadyn Genest is a writer and editor from Central Florida, currently residing in New England. They earned their BA in English literature with a certificate in editing and publishing from the University of Central Florida. They contributed in an editorial capacity to The Florida Review and served as associate editor at The Pegasus Review.
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