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.

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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).

http://www.literaturhaus.at

[ book tip by Incentives ] I would like to lie on the edge of the world...

Love is the continuation of war by other means, writes Elfriede Jelinek. “There is always violence here. There is always fighting here. It is eternal war,” answers Ingeborg Bachmann’s nameless first-person narrator Malina. Ivan is the name of the man who she adores. Ivan is also the name of the idolised man in Michaela Falkner’s new book Kaltschweißattacken (‘Cold Sweat Attacks. Requiem für/for Euphoria Struck Knees’). The war zone is here measured out to include the furthest boundaries of the eternal war of the sexes.

The love of the nameless first-person narrator is obsessive: “I need you without you I am nothing.” Her love is as boundless as the attacks of physical violence are excessive. The situation intensifies with the birth of three children that are unwanted by the mother. Nothing more concrete can be understood from the text.
This experimental text is a densely woven texture of devoted love relationships and tirades of hate, extreme acts of violence and attacks of fear, pain and panic; interrupted by cries for help and the wish that it would end: "Then I fall over I simply fall over."
Only sometimes are the word fields condensed to situational fragments and islands of meaning. There are indications of a train journey, an apartment house with stairs and a garden, a hospital and birth scenes, preparations for Christmas, references to a crime investigation. The rest takes place in the reader’s imagination and in the intestines of language.

To the degree that the writer makes her own ego the place of her literary designs, the language becomes physical. Consequently, the body of the text, which is to be understood in a literal sense, becomes the direct object of violence. In her literary performance, Falkner inflicts wounds on the word become flesh. There remains the certainty: "It will not be whole again."

Michaela Falkner’s Kaltschweißattacken are radical, provocative and relentless. The writer brings us face to face with the question of why we find that which we are surrounded by in reality unbearable in the text. She writes herself directly into the reality of the reader’s life. What more can one demand from a literary text?

Translated by Peter Waugh

Review by Michaela Schmitz, Feb. 2009
Original version: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=933

[ book info ] Falkner, Michaela: Kaltschweißattacken. (Cold Sweat Attacks.Requiem für / for Euphoria Struck Knees). (original language: Deutsch) Residenz, St. Pölten-Salzburg, 2009 . ISBN: 9783701715091.