“Family” is repeatedly featured in Eva Menasse’s oeuvre, from her first novel Vienna (2007) to her latest novel, Quasikristalle (2013). As she explains in the following interview, families are secretive and mysterious, and often connected to a specific place. For Menasse, this place is Vienna, a city full of secrets, the place where she was born. Where Menasse’s first novel is set in Vienna and inspired by her own family story, her most recent novel Quasikristalle takes place in Berlin, the city where she has lived for the past fifteen years. In Quasikristalle, Menasse borrows the Nobel Laureate chemist Dan Shechtman’s theory 1 to tell the life story of Xane (Roxane) Molin, who is presented in a kaleidoscopic multiplicity of perspectives via family members, friends and acquaintances. Menasse’s portrayal of Xane’s unpredictable, complicated, and contradictory life story is imparted through the perspective of her son, and features Xane’s early life in Vienna, her marriage to a German intellectual and her life in Berlin, her attempts to become pregnant with the help of fertilization specialists, her problems with being a stepmother, her life as an old woman, and finally her decision to return to Vienna.