Lotte and Archimboldi reunite after she recognizes her own family in The King of the Forest, a novel by the brother she has long been unable to find. Her discovery connects his public identity as a celebrated, absent writer to the private history he has transformed into fiction; when he finally appears at her home, the siblings speak through the night about Klaus and the killings in Santa Teresa, without reaching a solution to Lotte’s distress.

The book on the flight

In 2001, Lotte travels to Mexico to follow the case of her son, Klaus, who is detained in connection with the killings of women in Santa Teresa. At Frankfurt airport, while waiting for her flight to Los Angeles, she buys a book and several magazines. She is not ordinarily a committed reader, and the books she tends to buy are celebrity biographies or accounts by actors and television personalities. This time, by mistake or in her haste, she chooses The King of the Forest, by Benno von Archimboldi.

The book is fewer than 150 pages long. It describes a one-legged father, a one-eyed mother, and their two children: a boy who likes to swim and a girl who follows her brother to the cliffs. As the plane crosses the Atlantic, Lotte realizes that she is reading part of her childhood. The recognition turns an airport purchase into an encounter with family history, and the flight becomes the point at which Archimboldi’s published work reaches her more directly than any message from its author.

Recognition and the author’s identity

Lotte finds the novel’s style strange despite its clear, sometimes transparent writing. Its successive stories seem not to lead anywhere; the people and places recede until nature itself appears to dissolve and disappear. During the flight, she reads the book a second time, skipping passages that do not concern her family, house, neighbors, or garden. By the end, she has no doubt that its author is her brother. She briefly considers whether Archimboldi might have spoken with him, then rejects the possibility because the book contains things she believes her brother would never have told anyone. She does not pause over the contradiction that publishing those details has made them available to the world.

The cover offers no author photograph, but it gives a birth year: 1920, the year her brother was born. It also lists numerous books published by the same house and notes that Archimboldi has been translated into twelve languages and has been mentioned for several years as a possible Nobel recipient. In Los Angeles, while waiting for her connection to Tucson, Lotte searches airport bookstores for more of his work but finds no other Archimboldi titles. His public literary reputation and his lack of a visible face sharpen the difference between the recognized author and the brother she knows through the details embedded in this one book.

A call to the publisher

That night in her hotel, Lotte calls the Bubis offices in Hamburg and asks for the publisher. The secretary says that Mrs. Bubis is not yet in. Lotte asks that the publisher be told that Lotte Haas, Archimboldi’s sister—or Hans Reiter’s sister—has called. She later calls back and identifies herself directly to Mrs. Bubis as the sister of both Benno von Archimboldi and Hans Reiter. The two names bring his public literary identity and his family identity into a single conversation, but Lotte is so uncertain what to say that she falls quiet. She is on the verge of tears as she confirms that she is calling from Mexico.

In their conversation, Mrs. Bubis recalls that Lotte was a very blond, pale child and that her mother sometimes brought her to work at the house. Lotte initially cannot place the reference. She then remembers accompanying her mother to the country estate of Baron Von Zumpe, where she helped dust, sweep, polish candlesticks, and wax floors. Before Lotte can respond, Mrs. Bubis says she hopes she will hear from her brother soon and ends the call. Lotte remains seated with the phone pressed to her ear, unable to turn this contact with someone from the past into an answer about Archimboldi’s whereabouts.

The reunion in Germany

Three months after returning to Germany, Lotte is at home in her nightdress and about to go to bed when the doorbell rings. Asked over the intercom who is there, the visitor answers that it is her brother. Archimboldi has appeared in person, reversing the absence that had led Lotte to seek him through his book and his publisher.

The siblings talk until dawn. Lotte tells him about Klaus and the killings of women in Santa Teresa. She also recounts Klaus’s dreams, in which a giant will rescue him from prison, and remarks that Archimboldi no longer looks like a giant. Archimboldi answers that he never was one. The exchange sets Klaus’s imagined rescuer against the brother who has actually arrived: the dream’s giant promises rescue, while the real reunion offers Lotte someone to tell, but no stated means of changing Klaus’s situation.

An encounter without resolution

After a long silence, Lotte says that she no longer knows what to do. She feels she lacks strength, understands little, and is frightened by what she does understand; nothing, she says, makes sense. The novel does not present the reunion as a cure for her uncertainty. Archimboldi’s arrival closes the immediate distance between brother and sister, but their conversation leaves the central pressures intact: Klaus remains caught up in the Santa Teresa case, and the killings continue to occupy Lotte’s attention.

The sequence also binds recognition to absence. Lotte first encounters her brother through a fictional account of childhood details she thought private; only afterward does he come to her door. His book provides enough knowledge for her to identify him, but not enough to explain the years of separation or to resolve her present fears. Their nighttime conversation therefore functions as a reunion and a disclosure, while its ending preserves the uncertainty that brought Lotte to seek him.