What other central european authors do you read?

[R.P.Dwyer]

Thanks, Mr. Dwyer for your comments on Durrenmatt. Durrenmatt is relatively unknown in English-speaking countries and if book publishers ever decide to bring out his untranslated works, it will be thanks to readers like yourself. Are you aware of "The Pledge"? Like "Traps" it's a major work and easily available thanks to the Penn movie of a few years back.

Mark Samuels did me a real kindness and sent me a copy from London of Durrenmatt's one act play, "Conversation at Night with a Despised Character". It was televised on the BBC in 1969 with Sir John Gielgud and Sir Alec Guinness. It's the story of a writer's encounter with the assassin sent to kill him by the State. (Earlier, D. had taken aim at the Black fascists with "Suspicion"; this time he had the Red fascists in his sights.) It's a brilliant work with the author at the peak of his powers.

WARNING: SPOILER AHEAD

The ending isn't a twist; it's a warm pretzel, nicely salted, and with spicy mustard. Any other writer would have the Author lecture and teach the Hangman a thing or two about basic humanity, perhaps even instill deep doubts about the 'rightness' of his profession. But this is Durrenmatt. Guess who teaches who how to "die humbly" and unconquered?
I would have loved to have seen this with those two great actors.

Sorry for the late reply. I haven't read the others works you mentioned, and will seek it. I heard that the The Pledge is sort of a critique of the detective genre. I have some problems about that genre too.

I first heard of Durrenmatt through......Colin Wilson! Another writer that Colin Wilson thought highly of is David Lindsay. And I just recently found out that Colin Wilson was a big fan of Grabinski
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151755777431791&id=104187931790

Durrenmat, David Lindsay, Grabinski. Colin Wilson had some excellent literary judgment.

 

[AndrewSFTSN]

I'm nowhere near well read as the average TLO forum member it seems but have enjoyed works by

Robert Walser
Witold Gombrowicz
Jaroslav Hasek
(Some) Stanislaw Lem
Skylark by Dezso Kosztolyani

 

[xylokopos]

I finished this book a few hours ago on a flight back to the city where I live. It is a book about books and since all of us here are People of the Book, I recommend it without the slightest hesitation. Too loud a solitude also continues a grand European tradition of alienated narrators with intense inner lives, but deviates from the path trod by Dostoyevsky and Kafka and many others through its weirdly uplifting, almost slapstick scatology, and its even grimmer ending.

I fear I am not doing this book justice. Too loud a solitude is the story of a lonely man in a [slightly] alternative post-WWII Prague, where books are destroyed en masse; the narrator is employed as a compactor of books and wastepaper. He toils in a cellar, in front of a hydraulic press, which he feeds all sorts of paper, from reproductions of Van Gogh's paintings, to blooded wrapping paper from the city's butcheries to leatherbound volumes of Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant and Novalis. The hydraulic press compacts wastepaper and Hanta, the narrator, ties together gigantic bales which are then dispatched via lorries to the city's papermills, where the pulped paper is doused in alkalis and other chemicals and emerges virgin and blank again.

In the course of his travails in his rat-infested cellar next to mountains of paper and his hydraulic press, Hanta manages to save thousands of books from destruction and drags them to his room, where he sleeps under "two tons of them", a permanent Sword of Damocles hanging over his drunk sleep.

As he works and as he drinks beer he remembers stories spanning his thirty-five years as destroyer of books and creator of bales of compacted paper. I won't reveal the content of these stories except to write that they are a strange mix of love and cruelty and I won't reveal the ending except to write that it broke my heart, even though it was foretold in many ways. After all, we all become obsolete in the end, foreigners in our own lives, men overtaken by events beyond us; we always end up as depositories of memories that mean nothing to others but everything to us.

We all start out as books and end up as bales of wastepaper.

 

[bendk]

I finished this book a few hours ago on a flight back to the city where I live. It is a book about books and since all of us here are People of the Book, I recommend it without the slightest hesitation. Too loud a solitude also continues a grand European tradition of alienated narrators with intense inner lives, but deviates from the path trod by Dostoyevsky and Kafka and many others through its weirdly uplifting, almost slapstick scatology, and its even grimmer ending.

I fear I am not doing this book justice. Too loud a solitude is the story of a lonely man in a [slightly] alternative post-WWII Prague, where books are destroyed en masse; the narrator is employed as a compactor of books and wastepaper. He toils in a cellar, in front of a hydraulic press, which he feeds all sorts of paper, from reproductions of Van Gogh's paintings, to blooded wrapping paper from the city's butcheries to leatherbound volumes of Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant and Novalis. The hydraulic press compacts wastepaper and Hanta, the narrator, ties together gigantic bales which are then dispatched via lorries to the city's papermills, where the pulped paper is doused in alkalis and other chemicals and emerges virgin and blank again.

In the course of his travails in his rat-infested cellar next to mountains of paper and his hydraulic press, Hanta manages to save thousands of books from destruction and drags them to his room, where he sleeps under "two tons of them", a permanent Sword of Damocles hanging over his drunk sleep.

As he works and as he drinks beer he remembers stories spanning his thirty-five years as destroyer of books and creator of bales of compacted paper. I won't reveal the content of these stories except to write that they are a strange mix of love and cruelty and I won't reveal the ending except to write that it broke my heart, even though it was foretold in many ways. After all, we all become obsolete in the end, foreigners in our own lives, men overtaken by events beyond us; we always end up as depositories of memories that mean nothing to others but everything to us.

We all start out as books and end up as bales of wastepaper.

Book sounds great. And "slapstick scatology" LOL. So glad I dropped by TLO today.

On a second note, I think TLOers would really enjoy Kadare's Palace of Dreams and The Pyramid.

 

[Chroale]

Josef Winkler (Austrian writer)

https://www.amazon.de/Graveyard-Bitter-Oranges-Josef-Winkler/dp/1940625149/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1482420460&sr=8-1&keywords=Graveyard+of+Bitter+Oranges

 

[Mr. Veech]

I would also highly recommend Heinrich von Kleist. Some of his short stories (I have read one volume) are among the best I have read.

I have been reading Kleist with enjoyment "Marquise of O and other stories" Greenberg translation - but just a note of warning if you are thinking of reading these - do not read the preface - even though it is by Thomas Mann first - also do not read the intro (save - these until afterward) they will describe the stories and detract from them.

What did you think of "The Foundling?"

 

[Hanswurst]

Josef Winkler (Austrian writer)

Graveyard of Bitter Oranges: Amazon.de: Josef Winkler, Adrian Nathan West: Fremdsprachige Bcher

Never heard of Josef Winkler before, thanks for the tip! There are actually a lot of dark and/or weird Austrian writers. Hans Lebert, Alfred Kubin and Fritz von Herzmanowsky-Orlando for example. The morbid poems of H.C. Artmann should be mentioned, too. But i'm not shure if there are good english translations of them available.

 

[bendk]

I recently read Heinrich von Kleist's novella, Michael Kohlhaas. I thought it was outstanding. Swindled by a debauched aristocracy that claims to rule by divine right, he rises up and metes out justice of his own. The ensuing slaughter is as entertaining as it is just.

It was recently filmed (2014) as Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas. It stars Mads Mikkelsen. I'll have to hunt that down.

 

[Mr. Veech]

I recently read Heinrich von Kleist's novella, Michael Kohlhaas. I thought it was outstanding.

It was recently filmed (2014) as Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas. It stars Mads Mikkelsen. I'll have to hunt that down.

Kleist is so wonderful! I'm so obsessed with his work that I've been trying to finish a particular story which is inspired by both "The Foundling" and "The Marquise of O."

 

[xylokopos]

Not sure if this belongs here, but since the author has been mentioned a couple of times on this thread and I think some of us are always on the lookout for this sort of thing:

I just ordered Hans Henny Jahnn's The Living are Few, the Dead Many from the Book Depository. It is 57% off right now. I have no idea how long these deals last.

 

[xylokopos]

I read Gotthelf's novella in two sittings.

I am not sure when I first heard of it; it is entirely possible that I learned of the existence of this author from Bolaño - he mentions the Swiss pastor Bitzius [ Gotthelf's real name] in 2666. I have been meaning to read it ever since I read Chessex, who wrote very bleakly about Swiss Calvinists and their obsession with Sin and Retribution.

The Black Spider is the story of a curse; or rather, of a deal with the devil gone wrong. After a christening in an idyllic Bernese village, an old man is asked about a blackened window post in his house. He recounts a story that took place in the Middle Ages, when the villagers were serfs to the Teutonic knights, who ruled from their castle on the hill. In order to comply to their master's cruel demands, they entered into a bargain with the devil, who in turn demanded an unbaptized child as payment. When the villagers reneged on their promise, terrible satanic vengeance was visited upon them.

It is a beautifully written book - pastoral beauty frames the horror of the tale. It is a folk tale or a morality play or a pastor's terrifying sermon against indulgence and moral decline. It is also properly shocking and revolting and bound to induce arachnophobia to the reader.

Highly recommended.

 

[xylokopos]

I am halfway through Georg Heym's The Thief and Other Stories and I shall be the third one in this thread to recommend that collection without the slightest reservation. His language has a magnificent expressive fluidity and if you are like me, you will appreciate his interspersing biblical quotation or allusion among violent, natural imagery.

Heym died at 24.

 

[Vice]

I am halfway through Georg Heym's The Thief and Other Stories and I shall be the third one in this thread to recommend that collection without the slightest reservation. His language has a magnificent expressive fluidity and if you are like me, you will appreciate his interspersing biblical quotation or allusion among violent, natural imagery.

Heym died at 24.

I enjoyed The Lunatic very much.Such a fascinating depiction of Peter Kurten.

 

[xylokopos]

Such a fascinating depiction of Peter Kurten

An intriguing notion! But do the dates fit? Or is it the opposite, life imitating art? The story was published just before Heym died, in 1911, if I am not mistaken. Had Kurten committed any serious crimes that had already come to light by that time? His litany of perverse aggressions was revealed in his trial before his execution, around twenty years later. I think Lang's M, which was released that year (1931), was loosely based on Kurten. In any case, whichever way inspiration went, what an extraordinary and evil synergy!

I read the last couple of stories on the train back from work today. Jonathan and The Ship were relentlessly depressing. I think the last author I read that had such an unyielding and hopeless vision for his protagonists was Hedayat.

 

[Vice]

Indeed M is loosely based on some details regarding the modus operandi of Peter Kurten...Peter Lorre plays a fantastic role.

There is also the short story Singing Blood by Reggie Oliver from the Delicate Toxins anthology that brings back some memories

 

[Hieronimo]

Not sure if anyone else on the Ligotti site has mentioned The Nightwatches of Bonaventura, published anonymously in German in 1804. If a weirder novel was published before this date I'd like to know about it (it's even stranger than Potocki's Saragossa Manuscript).

From the University of Chicago Press blurb:

"The Nightwatches of Bonaventura is a dark, twisted, and comic novel, one part Poe and one part Beckett. The narrator and antihero is ... a nightwatchman named Kreuzgang, a failed poet, actor and puppeteer who claims to be the spawn of the devil himself. As a nightwatchman, Kreuzgang takes voyeuristic pleasure in spying on the follies of his fellow citizens, and every night he makes his rounds and stops to peer into a window or door, where he observes framed scenes of murder, despair, theft, romance... For him, life is a grotesque, macabre, and base joke played by a mechanical, heartless force."

Add to that a gothic atmosphere and a poetic rhetoric that anticipates Lautréamont. A book that deserves to be much better known than it currently is.

 

[xylokopos]

I am not sure that a review of Krzhizhanovsky's Autobiography of a Corpse belongs here; he was a Soviet citizen, living in Moscow and writing in Russian. Then again, he was born in the Ukraine to Polish parents and therefore was at least East European in origin. And as every schoolboy knows, Eastern Europe borders Central Europe thus rendering Krzhizhanovsky a relatively viable candidate for inclusion in this thread.

Autobiography of a Corpse was not published during the author's lifetime. It is hard to classify. The best I can do is the following:

This book is a strange mix of absurdist social satire, psychogeography, and philosophical parable. It references philosophers, social theories, scientific experiments and literary movements constantly; it features Leibniz as the Inventor of Optimism, a machine that turns human resentment into an energy source, a man who collects cracks, another man whose goal in life is to bite his own elbow, and a long sequence of manic perambulators that criss cross Moscow; it introduces talking toads from the rivers of the underworld and human reflections living inside other people's eyes.

Since the stories take place in Moscow in the aftermath of the October Revolution and the Russian Civil war, they do survey a Moscow that is overcrowded, energized, filled with war orphans sleeping inside cement trucks for warmth, writers, censors and bureaucrats engaged in silent warfare and post-Revolutionary fervor that razes ancient churches to the ground. But there is no Socialist Realism here and too many ambivalent allusions to slogans, crowds marching and governmental policies. It is therefore not a big surprise that these stories were not accepted for publication.

Krzhizhanovsky is obsessed with notions of personhood and identity. The "I" is usually italicized and further qualified in his stories, which are mostly written in the first person. Notions of the average person or the use of "person" in statistics, abound. There is a hilarious reflection on population density: the narrator is terrified by the statement regarding an area having "0.6 people per square mile" since as a child he takes it literally. In another story, Ises and Nots are presented like characters. Fissures in time are investigated and the dichotomy between the transcendent and the immanent is given a magnificent treatment in the story that concludes this collection, called Postmark: Moscow.

This is a great short story collection and I absolutely recommend it. If you are like me, mostly reading on the train to and from work, you experience the added pleasure of seeing people trying to mentally pronounce Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky when they glance at the cover.

 

[qcrisp]

I think earlier in the thread I mentioned having Hugo von Hofmannsthal on my shelves.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/158610.The_Lord_Chandos_Letter

Since then, I've actually read the book. It is well worth it, especially for the title story. I think it was almost exactly a year ago now that I read it. There's a real sense of existential mystery to the stories.

 

[Hieronimo]

I've just read Leo Perutz's The Marquis of Bolibar, set in Spain during the Napoleon's peninsular campaign. It's short, beautifully written (nicely translated), well-plotted, and subtly edged with the fantastic, with the appearance of the legendary Wandering Jew as a character.

 

[Chroale]

Hermann Burger, a Swiss author, who committed suicide in 1989, is one of my favourites. As he himself once said, his work essentially revolves around the "three high Cs": the Cimiterian, the Cigarristic and the Circensic.