Incentives - New Literature from Austria

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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 ] Manfred Rumpl’s novel is not literary pornography, even though it has been advertised as such by the publishers. It is a tightrope walk between explicit, partly sado-masochist scenes, and this is mastered by the author with an assurance of style and sensitivity.

After Faust in Fausts Fall (‘The Fall of Faust’) in 2007, Rumpl, who was born in Styria in 1960, now literally sends a couple tumbling from life: firstly, the almost 40 year-old Valery Zett falls from the window of a Viennese hotel of ill-repute, then her traumatised husband takes his leave from his career as an engineer and his rationally determined course of life. In the third part of the novel, their daughter Ida attempts to elucidate the fatal defenestration, having beforehand – in chapters that always alter their perspective and chronology – shed light retrospectively on the Zetts’ 20 years of married life: the young Valery breaks off her studies because she is pregnant and brings up her children in a suburban house in Vienna, while Z – consistently mentioned without his forename – at first achieves happiness in his career and with his children, but then soon begins to pale.

Valery’s diary, from which the author quotes at the end, records her secret break-out from a cold marriage, as well as her secondary existence as a prostitute and her desperate search for intensity. A mysterious stranger eventually awakens her passion, the sado-masochist rituals in sinister cellars turning into a kind of love. A new dependence begins, as one-sided as ever.

The explicitly erotic scenes heat up the basic melancholic mood of the novel, which describes in exact detail two existences caught between loneliness and desire. Rumpl, who himself studied philosophy, makes their philosophical translation into gravity and timelessness clear at the end – the Z in the alphabet of life.

(Translated by Peter Waugh)
Roland Steiner, October 2008

[ book info ] Rumpl, Manfred: Ihr Mann und der Fremde. (Her Husband and the Stranger). (original language: Deutsch) Luftschacht Verlag, Wien, 2008 . ISBN: 978-3-902373-31-1.