written on October 16, 2026, read January 1995
I still remember exactly where I bought this book: Münster. In a bookshop in town.1 The Bundeswehr had sent me there, and the barracks were fairly close to the city centre. So, plenty of opportunities to buy books. It must have been winter, because I picture a brightly lit bookshop while it was already getting dark outside.
One of my bigger paper investments of that time was a hardcover by Frederick Forsyth: “The Fist of God”. On the rather meagre allowance the state paid me, I couldn’t really afford my present-day snobbery of preferring to buy only hardcovers.
I devoured the book back then. The investment didn’t last long. I think I had finished it within a few days. In this book, Forsyth very skilfully wove the fictional story of preventing the use of an Iraqi atomic bomb into the events surrounding the Second Gulf War (Desert Shield/Desert Storm). That was, after all, one of Forsyth’s strengths: making his stories sufficiently plausible through this kind of anchoring, but above all very gripping.
But something else reminds me of this book even more: a friend had given me a cassette back then. On it was the album “Semantic Spaces” by Delerium. I read the book while listening to this music. When I read the book a second time some while later, “Karma” by the same band had just come out. I don’t know whether that was a coincidence or whether I picked up the book again because the music reminded me of it.
These days I hardly listen to Delerium anymore (or to Conjure One, which shares Rhys Fulber with Delerium and bears a clear resemblance to it in many places). If I remember correctly, Delerium was something of a pre-millennium thing for me. I bought only one more album of theirs, when Delerium released acoustic versions of some tracks from their catalogue. By then, much of Delerium had simply been remixed and played to death. “Silence” was one such victim of its own success. I came to Conjure One later through Mr Betrisey and his Drop Remix of “Like Ice”. But Conjure One never had quite the same effect on me. Perhaps it simply lacked the right book at the right time. Neither can be found today on any of the playlists I still listen to. And the last time I read the book was surely 20 years ago as well.
But when my computer happens to play Delerium, I am in Forsyth’s Gulf War Iraq. In the desert.
And even if Delerium is, at heart, often just pseudo-ethno synthesizer burble2 and “The Fist of God” just a well-written thriller, the two together hold a special meaning for me that neither would have on its own.
Perhaps this combination says something about how memories work. Just as, for me, the Interregio train still smells of butter cake almost 40 years after a visit to the eye doctor in Bad Zwischenahn.