Incentives - New Literature from Austria

readme.cc provides multilingual access to the latest Austrian literature. In collaboration with the Literaturhaus in Vienna the reading forum offers the latest insights about literature published in Austria.

Literary journalists and researchers introduce current new publications; reading samples allow for a closer look at the texts; short portraits of the authors complement the picture.

The range of information is currently available in five languages: German, English, French, Czech and Hungarian.

The Project "Incentives" targets at the internationalization of Austrian literature, respectively the translation of current texts.

Project realization: the Office of Documentation of Contemporary Austrian Literature (reviews, author’s portraits) – The Association of Translators (translations) – readme.cc (infrastructure).

http://www.literaturhaus.at

[ book tip by Incentives ]
When eminent names are being named, mention will be made of the journals of Karl-Markus Gauss from Salzburg, who has now published his fourth such book, entitled Ruhm am Nachmittag (Fame in the Afternoon): Elias Canetti or the Frenchman Alain (Émile Chartier). In this connection the term ‘journal’ is itself a stopgap. That is because these volumes are not diaries, not records of work done, not experiments in self-contemplation. And so in this way Gauss, the literary critic, essayist, traveller and editor in charge of a periodical, the graduate in German and History, avoids every genre label.

The book is one that provides information while displaying curiosity. Seeking, keeping a lookout, observing, looking at and picking up delightfully disturbing trivialities: these are the elemental motivating forces behind the way that Gauss perceives and describes the world. His world is tied to people. And these, not infrequently, are authors. While the Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski was at the centre of an earlier volume, it is now the Hungarian novelist Sándor Márai and his diary. More conscientiously than ever Gauss dives into his own biography, telling of his adventures as his own envoy and the journeys to hand in manuscripts to the composing rooms in pre-digital times (in which, as soon as he was on his way in Salzburg, it could be relied on to rain). He remembers his childhood; and perhaps he is indeed really writing, as is discreetly pointed out at the end, the book about himself and Salzburg in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

It is a highly artistic, artistically conjured up, euphonious game with time that is unfolded here: with written time (as the time of writing), with lived time (as the time of living), with the oblivion of time (when, for example, he writes at length about Boris Pahor, the Slovene from Trieste, and reflects on Richard Bermann alias Arnold Höllriegl, who was forced into exile in 1938). But there is something else hiding behind this obsession with time: the living community of contemporaries.


Abridged from the review by Alexander Kluy, May 2012. English translation by Leigh H. Bailey.
Full German text: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=9466

[ book info ] Gauß, Karl-Markus: Ruhm am Nachmittag. (original language: German) Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna, 2012 . ISBN: 978-3-552-05567-4.
Translated from German