Hennes van Veldes has just graduated from film school in Berlin. To earn a little money, and to give meaning to his empty life, he styles himself a free-lance documentary filmmaker. In that capacity, he is contacted by an aging writer, Cornelius Düler, who asks him to make a documentary about Wolfgang Laib, an artist who lives in southern Germany.

This strange client, who wants the film only for himself, will finance the entire project. So Hennes takes his camera and goes to live in a youth hostel, as he films any trace he can find of Laib, who remains invisible. After days of wandering around a deserted house in the cold and gloomy countryside, Hennes start to lose touch with reality.

An extremely well-constructed and masterfully written narrative in which tongue-in-cheek humor is omnipresent. An accurate, melancholic portrait of our times, L’absence de ciel is reminiscent of Houellebecq in its descriptions of youth hostels that have no soul, a countryside that has no nature, and artists that get no recognition… in a documentary with no subject by a young man with no vocation.

L’absence de ciel – a road novel that holds our attention with the quality of its descriptions – delivers a very contemporary message about human relations, youth, the end of school, the Internet, and ugly landscapes. A captivating book that gets under your skin, drawing you in with its style and strange, tense emptiness.