Out of the Sugar Factory

If the connections between world events should suddenly be wiped out, we would be grateful to find Dorothee Elmiger's book to help us understand what happened in the past. Its subject: the cycles of capital, labour, and a lust. Its form: a journal full of observations, surveys and investigations.

"My skills never end" is the slogan on the T-shirt of a worker receiving his wages. Switzerland's first lottery millionaire stands on the beach of a Caribbean island looking out to sea. At night, goats crowd around the writer's bed.

Dorothee Elmiger tracks down money and desire through the centuries and the world. She writes biographies of mystics, the insatiable, gamblers, orgiasts and colonialists, studies the routes of the ships on the Atlantic, records dreams and cases of ecstasy and madness. Out of the Sugar Factory documennts this research in a text that opens our eyes to the complexity of the world.