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).

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[ book tip by Incentives ] Reinhard Kaiser-Mühlecker’s first novel Der lange Gang über die Stationen (The Long Walk From Station to Station) takes place in the Salzkammergut Area in upper Austria in the 1950s. The young farmer Theodor marries a woman from the city. The couple’s young love blossoms like an innocent and tender spring flower. When the two of them take a walk down to the river or across the hills, it feels like a rediscovery of the romanticism of the 19th Century.

Their love is described as being so pure and idyllic the reader soon realizes that it cannot last. “Theodor, you have to be careful that you don’t run smack into a wall!“ warns his farmboy. But he, the sensitive farmer, does anyway. Not only inner but also outer problems weigh him down: his investments fail to pay off; his neighbor, one of his few confidants, commits suicide; his father is seriously ill. Theodor falls deeper and deeper into the black hole that opens up between himself and those around him; the end of the novel sees him escaping into the sinister woods on a dark winter day, along with a bottle of spirits.

Der lange Gang über die Stationen is a book providing a dense atmosphere that suceeds in captivating its readers from the first to the last page. A new voice: the language is poetic without being tacky, classic-antiquated yet full of small breaks in the choice of words and syntax, artificial yet natural. An extraordinary first novel by an extraordinarily talented young author.

(Translated by Johanna Ellsworth)
Long Version: Peter Landerl, October 2008

[ book info ] Kaiser-Mühlecker, Reinhard: Der lange Gang über die Stationen. (The Long Walk From Station to Station). (original language: Deutsch) Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg, 2008 . ISBN: 978-3-455-40104-2.