Konrad Beikircher über Ovid «Liebeskunst»: Die Schule, die ich in Bozen besuchte, war das Franziskanergymnasium und dieses legte Wert auf Latein und Altgriechisch. Ich gestehe: auch wenn ich kein As war, habe ich beides gerne gemacht. Was mich allerdings damals immer schon belustigt hat, war dieses hölzerne Altphilologen-Deutsch, in dem die Übersetzungen dahergestelzt kamen. Mit dem Abitur war das natürlich erst mal vergessen, bis ich mit zunehmendem Alter immer mehr die Schönheit und...
Über die leidenschaftlichste Großmutter aller Zeiten Jenseits des Urals herrschen klare Verhältnisse: Die Tatarin Rosalinda bestimmt, ihr Gatte Kalganow spurt, und ihre Tochter Sulfia benimmt sich schlecht. Es mangelt an vielem, aber nicht an Ideen, und schon gar nicht an Willenskraft. Es steht also immer etwas Scharfes auf dem Tisch, und alle größeren Malheurs, die Sulfia anrichten könnte, werden verhindert. Nur ihre Schwangerschaft nicht, und auch nicht die Geburt von Aminat, dem genauen...
Part prophecy and part erotic fantasy, this classic tale of otherworldly depravity features New York itself—or a foreigner's nightmare of New York—as its true protagonist. Set in the towers and tunnels of the quintessential American city, Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel turns this urban space into a maze where politics bleeds into perversion, revolution into sadism, activist into criminal, vice into art—and back again. Following the logic of a movie half-glimpsed through a haze of drugs...
Mathilde Lewly—a female painter at the dawn of the twentieth century—has achieved notoriety among the Parisian avant-garde. She and her husband, also a talented young artist, pursue their separate visions side by side in a Clichy atelier, galvanized by the artistic ferment that surrounds them. But the couple are threatened by the shadow of Mathilde's little sister, Eugénie: since the two girls' sudden departure from their native England, Eugénie has been determined to vault the eight...
Arguably Gordon Lish's masterpiece, Peru begins with its narrator announcing, «There is nothing which I will not tell you if I can think of it.» Gradually, the story of a dark childhood secret—real or imagined—unfolds: in 1940, six-year-old Gordon murdered his harelipped rival, Steven Adinoff, in a Long Island sandbox . . . (unless he didn't). Peru's narrator weaves together strands of disconnected, mesmerizing trivia, resurrecting memories of the mundane suburban childhood that...
A woman falls into a coma. Perhaps she's going to die. Becoming the sleeper's shadow, the woman's daughter will accompany her mother through six weeks of agony, bearing witness to the prolonged death imposed upon her by the monstrous machine of modern medicine. During this final voyage through the fog, the narrator attempts to recover the vivacious woman she knew before this illness: the mad lover, the romantic spouse, the musician who sacrificed her dreams to the reality of life...
When Vic meets Lali, they stumble into a dysfunctional ten-year relationship that leaves him in ruins and raising a child on his own. As Vic strives to protect their daughter from the cruel truths of his relationship with her mother, he finds himself hopelessly submerged in Lali's seemingly inexplicable contradictions, and their implications concerning his own inability to move on. Huddleston Road is an honest, often brutal examination of the loneliness that results from our inability to...
On the eve of a coup d'etat, the wife of a diplomat newly returned to Turkey from the United States finds that the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fuat, is in fact a childhood friend. Having married more for status than love, and quizzically unmoored from the reality of day-to-day existence in the capital, she begins to nurse an impossible love for her husband's superior, and in the process of telling us of her Bovary-like, novelistic infatuation, she confesses innumerable details of...
Poetic, comic, obsessed with minutiae, My Beautiful Bus is a welcome dose of serious frivolity at the expense of the contemporary novel. Based on an actual bus trip across France taken by Oulipo-member Jacques Jouet in the late '80s, his fictional reconstruction of the experience twenty years later focuses not so much on the scenery as on the possibilities offered an author by the eponymous vehicle and its occupants. With detours through everything from Puss in Boots to Pascal's...
The long-awaited final work and magnum opus of one of the United States’s greatest authors, critics, and tastemakers, In Partial Disgrace is a sprawling self-contained trilogy chronicling the troubled history of a small Central European nation bearing certain similarities to Hungary—and whose rise and fall might be said to parallel the strange contortions taken by Western political and literary thought over the course of the twentieth century. More than twenty years in the making, and...
In this eerie, compelling, and playful novel, a young man tormented by his feeble memory meets an elderly man, Robert, endowed with the recall of an elephant. Soon, in exchange for becoming his live-in servant, Robert agrees to allow his young protégé to inherit his prodigious memory upon his death. While this might seem a fair if absurd exchange, Robert's demands become progressively more macabre, until the narrator is forced to decide what he is truly willing to sacrifice for the ability...
The second volume in Stig Saeterbakken's loosely connected «S Trilogy» Self-Control moves from the dark portrait of codependent marriage featured in the acclaimed Siamese to a world of solitary loneliness and repression. A middle-aged man, Andreas Feldt, feeling that he is unable to communicate with his adult daughter over the course of a friendly lunch, announces on an inexplicable whim that he is going to get a divorce. Though his daughter is initially shocked, she quickly assimilates...