Liefern
Tomer Gardi’s Liefern (Delivery) is a multi-perspective novel that follows numerous characters, who work under precarious conditions in the delivery sector, in six different locations across the globe. This sector is mostly crewed by migrants (often without work permits), poor people, or outsiders with no other viable options. The global scope makes Liefern unusual and interesting.
The novel is divided into six parts, all set in a different place on a different continent: in Tel Aviv, Delhi, Berlin, Istanbul, Buenos Aires and a small village in Kenya. Sometimes the anecdotes are narrated by a delivery person, sometimes by other seemingly random people, who eventually come across a delivery person by ordering food or by coincidence. The plot is hard to summarize, because there are so many different characters and storylines. The character Gardi describes in greatest detail is Filmon, an Eritrean refugee in Tel Aviv. During Covid-19, he loses his café job and, in his desperate situation, starts working as a bicycle courier. Unfortunately, he is dependent on his fraudulent landlord Shai, who gives him the delivery service account under a fake name and takes a share of the profits in return. In other parts of the book, we get smaller glimpses of people: In Delhi, for example, Sachin starts to work in the delivery sector, when her husband leaves her – she soon learns to live with the stares she gets as a woman on a motorcycle and that the jammed streets are really dangerous. In Berlin, the Indian student Pavan delivers to pay for his studies and suffers from chronic stress. The novel shows that everywhere around the world, people are desperate to make ends meet, which often means that they have to work under harsh and exploitative conditions. The six stories are only very loosely connected and could all be read as individual short stories.
For a novel of around 300 pages, the global scope and sheer number of characters were perhaps a little too ambitious. This leads to a certain superficiality. Furthermore, the novel sometimes digresses thematically from the delivery sector to other topics such as hair transplants, air pollution, or the cut flower industry, which takes up valuable space that could have been used for more depth or to develop the thin connections between individual characters further. Liefern would certainly have benefited from a little more revision or more intensive editing, but it is nonetheless an important book that highlights the precariousness of a particular professional field as a global phenomenon.