The author of The Name of the Rose on why it is human to lie, how Berlusconi has used conspiracy theories to stay in power – and Eco’s love/hate relationship with his most famous book. With a link to a review of his recent novel The Cemetery of Prague (c) THE GUARDIAN, 2011
A review of Stasiuk’s great Warsaw city & crime novel “9”
by Tom Tomaszewski (c) THE INDEPENDENT, 2008
The Story of Dragoljub Milanović: a true Handke indeed.
“This is not a sermon, but (…) a story. A story to tell, if necessary, to a woodpile or an empty snail shell or even to myself alone, by the way not for the first time –”*
Peter Handke’s narrator, the self-appointed chronicler of Dragoljub Milanović’ Story, suffers from a strangely missionary pessimism that leads him to formulate unbearably beautiful sentences like the one quoted. And if no one listens to him, he is just going to talk to his “shoelace”, the “nutcracker”, or even a “worn-out doormat.”
‘Talk to the hand,” evil tongues of Americanized origin probably would tell him, but in Continue reading
Quite a lot of good articles on the playful writer & columnist
who was born 100 years ago – he’s probably one of the
most “Central European” Irish authors after Joyce…
(c) THE IRISH TIMES, 2011
A new novel by Austrian author Josef Haslinger recalls the gloomy gulag past of a Bohemian health spa. Continue reading
Thomas Glavinic’ new novel on a trip to Medjugorje, Bosnia-Hercegovina: Unterwegs im Namen des Herren [On the road in the name of the Lord].
Troubles begin early, when the first-person narrator boards “a not quite new coach which will bring me and the other pilgrims from Vienna to Medjugorje. There every day the mother of God appears, in whom I don’t believe unfortunately.” Predictable that for an undercover atheist writer and his photographer Ingo, this must become a living hell, even if he wants to get inspired by such environment.
“Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.” (H. Bloom)
Another printed interview > Harper’s Magazine, 2011
> GERMAN VERSION
The idea is not really new. ‘Postcolonial approaches’ to the late Habsburg Monarchy are already to be found in Robert Musil’s famous novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (“The Man Without Qualities”), and we can find instances of such a view with other contemporary observers as well, such as the Viennese art historian Hilde Zaloscer. Born in 1903 to a middle class, German-speaking Jewish family in Banja Luka, Bosnia, Zaloscer and her family fled to Vienna after the First World War, and then, in 1938, further to Alexandria, Egypt.
In her autobiography entitled Eine Heimkehr gibt es nicht (“There’s No Coming Home,” Vienna 1988), she repeatedly compares her “happy childhood days […] ‘on a volcano’”* with her Egyptian exile which at the time was de facto still under colonial rule:
“Basically it was the same constellation as in Bosnia before the First World War. There, too, a foreign ethnic group – in this case, the Austrians – in a country appropriated through violence, kept the people at an educationally inferior level by means of skillful politics.” (p. 129)* Continue reading
(…)
And down at last into this lap of stone
Between four cataracts of rock: a town
Peopled by sleepy eagles, whispering only
Of the sunburnt herdsman’s hopeless ploy:
A sterile earth quickened by shards of rock
Where nothing grows, not even in his sleep,
Continue reading
delirium clemens 