Fiction is a funny format. 

Read enough books and one can think that they have a grasp of the way stories are structured, that they know all the ways to tell a tale. 

The beauty of reading fiction is that when this happens, then without fail a novel will come along that will turn all their assumptions on their head.  A writer will bring forth from the shadows a new way in which to tell a tale. Adrian Duncan’s lyrical debut ‘Love Notes from a German Building Site’ is one such story. 

The story is structured around Paul, an Irish engineer working on a building site in Alexanderplatz, Berlin. He has moved there for work along with his girlfriend Evelyn, who is waiting to start a job in a Cologne museum. New to the city and unfamiliar with the language, Paul decides to chronicle his experience in a series of notebooks - his 'love notes' as he calls them. 

The building project forms the framework for exploring the volatile nature of life on a commercial building site. The organised chaos that it involves. Its effect on Paul’s temperament. How unsteady work relationships can be. How environments can cause creeping self-doubt to appear. 

The gruff nature of working on the building site is contrasted with the tenderness of Paul’s life with Evelyn. The pressure to appear strong in one life and the freedom to be vulnerable in another. The text is littered with quiet moments of beautiful reflection. An overarching sense of yearning resonates through it all. 

Duncan composes muted sparse prose. It is almost meditative in nature, cutting sweetly into the reader's psyche. The effect enables one to sink into his descriptions of the most rudimentary of things. For example, this is how he describes his dislike of reinforced concrete as a building material: 

‘I distrust its secrets, particularly the hidden bind between the concrete and the steel reinforcement bars within.’ 

This is a memoir-cum-journal fused together with abstract ideas on the complexities of language, on love, on art. A truly beautiful work about the simplicity and complexity of life. 

Adrian Duncan is a Berlin-based Irish visual artist who originally trained as a structural engineer. Winner of the John McGahern Book Prize, 2019, and shortlisted for the Dalkey Literary Awards Emerging Writer, 2020.