The book's wildly imaginative structures are built on meticulous research, and as the two men's separate, parallel existences unfold, they reveal astounding coincidences and heartbreaking reversals of fortune.
Words Without Borders called him "a comic genius, a master of dialogue and invention who finds humor in the darkest of places and darkness in the midst of jokes."
In it, Nenik reconstructs in detail for the first time the history of the house in which the writer Thomas Mann lived with his family in American exile between 1942 and 1952.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung compared it to Nenik's novel biography Reise durch ein tragikomisches Jahrhundert and described both as "amazing books".
Hielscher's paintings were an important influence for Meline, who sold the building land to Thomas Mann in 1940 and shortly afterwards also produced his own (unrealised) design for the house.
In January 2021, Audible Germany released the podcast "Schauergeschichte", written by Nenik and narrated by actor Nic Romm, which explores the origins, spread and impact of collective fears from the Enlightenment to the 20th century.
Deutschlandfunk praised the book's "immense artistry" and "daring" and compared it to Marcel Beyer's novel "Flying Foxes" (1996) and Jonathan Littell's "The Kindly Ones" (2006).
[11] Die Zeit called the novel "brilliant" and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung declared that Nenik "creates his sparks from the combination of detective, almost obsessive archival and reading work with an insatiable artistic delight in language" and found the book to be "also linguistically, decidedly refined".
Based on extensive research, in it Nenik recounts the development of medicine from 1800 onward "as an often maddening sequence of discoveries and aberrations, chance and luck.