#germanlitmonth 2022

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Everything about everybody is nothing but diversion from death: Yes by Thomas Bernard

Everything about everybody is nothing but diversion from death: Yes by Thomas Bernard @UChicagoPress #germanlitmonth

One would never accuse Thomas Bernhard of being a cheerful, optimistic writer—his fiction tends to themes of isolation, human misery and the deterioration of modern society. But that’s not to say he isn’t funny. His characters are typically wildly eccentric, usually scientists or scholars of some kind, with musical and/or philosophical inclinations. Yes, his fifth novel, originally published in…

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A Viennese Odyssey: Ulysses by Nicolas Mahler after James Joyce

A Viennese Odyssey: Ulysses by Nicolas Mahler after James Joyce @seagullbooks @wordkunst #germanlitmonth

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“Quiet the evening through till dawn.” The Sea in the Radio: Journal Sentences by Jürgen Becker

“Quiet the evening through till dawn.” The Sea in the Radio: Journal Sentences by Jürgen Becker @seagullbooks @wordkunst #germanlitmonth

Whenever a story began, he never quite understood where it was supposed to go. After my father died I found, in his office, a journal he kept for the last full year of his life. He recorded each day’s trips, chores and purchases with occasional comments about my mother’s health, the quality of a restaurant meal, or some other personal detail like a book he was reading. He also tracked the weather…

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The disquieting terrain of loss: Grove by Esther Kinsky

The disquieting terrain of loss: Grove by Esther Kinsky @FitzcarraldoEds @transitbooks #germanlitmonth

I arrived in Olevano in January, two months and a day after M.’s funeral. The journey was long and led through dingy winter landscapes, which clung indecisively to grey vestiges of snow. In the Bohemian Forest, freshly fallen, wet snow dripped from the trees, clouding the view through the Stifteresque underbrush to the young Vltava River, which not had even a thin border of jagged ice. As the…

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Is he really gone: Requiem for Ernst Jandl by Friederike Mayröcker

Is he really gone: Requiem for Ernst Jandl by Friederike Mayröcker @seagullbooks #GermanLitMonth

The loss, he says, the loss of someone so close, the loss of a HAND and HEART PARTNER is something so completely and utterly devastating, yet it may be, we may be able to keep right on speaking with this HEART and LOVE PARTNER continue conversing and may even expect a response from this person. I’ve long had an interest in literary expressions of immediate grief, a much more elusive task than one…