Incentives - New Literature from Austria

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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.

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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).

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[ كتاب مقترح من Incentives ]
“Traveling means going away, Majana said, but upon our arrival in New York, on a street corner in Midtown Manhattan, I saw something else in her eyes and it made me afraid. Traveling also means returning, and you never know where to.”
As Anna in Ruth Cerha’s debut novel, Kopf aus den Wolken (Head from the Clouds), formulates this sentence, her own relationship to the motif of travel is undergoing radical change. At the age of twenty-three she left her home of Vienna and her family. Since then she has moved from one city to another every six months and makes a point of not beginning anything she could not give up within a very short time. She perceives the eternal decamping and making a new start as a mechanism necessary to living, thanks to which her need for other people “has died off like a body part with no supply of blood.”
All of this begins to waver when in Cairo Anna meets Marjana, the rich daughter of a diplomat, who is not intimidated by Anna’s cold manner. With her questions about past relationships and experiences she gets Anna to resist her self-imposed rules one by one and to embark on her next trip together with her.
A trip into her own inner being, to the crucial stations of her past: her childhood in the Penzing district of Vienna with her elder brother Franjo, her stays in European cities as a young adult, the encounters with the painter, Paul, whose pictures draw out of Anna deeply buried memories, even those of the early death of her brother.  
Vienna is simultaneously the novel’s secret center and the place of a past, which has not been reappraised. Anna’s journey finds only a temporary end in Vienna. This is because Anna, by understanding traveling as returning, discovers its creative effect, which makes it possible for her to replace the years of silence with narration. At the same time she gets the chance to be able to lead a self-determined life, freed from the burdens of the past.
With Kopf aus den Wolken the author, born in Vienna in 1963, has succeeded in writing a novel, which is psychologically sensitive and finely composed, the reading of which is recommended.

Abbreviated review by Gianna Zocco, 4 August 2010.
English translation by Hillary Keel.
Complete version in German: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=8279

[ معلومات ] Cerha, Ruth: Kopf aus den Wolken. (original language: Deutsch) Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt/Main, 2010 (ja). ISBN: 978-3-8218-6114-2.