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 ] Ruhm (‘Fame’) is the laconic title of the new book by best-selling author Daniel Kehlmann. Its subtitle proclaims it to be 'A Novel in Nine Stories' and indeed the individual stories are skilfully connected to one another. Following a complex blueprint, Kehlmann transports his characters and readers to a labyrinthine hall of mirrors, playing a post-modern game of mise-en-abyme – 'Stories within stories within stories'. The stakes are high: questions of identity, of reality and fiction, of the significance of the relationship between reality and literature, of the work of art in an age of the internet and mobile phone, and of the possibilities which these new media open up with regard to anonymity, changes of identity and double lives.

The technician Ebling suddenly begins to receive phone calls which – due to some mistake in the allocation of telephone numbers – are actually intended for the film star Ralf Tanner. For a short time, Ebling is therefore able to escape from his everyday life and believe in the illusion that 'Ralf’s being had always been intended for him' and that 'their two fates had only been reversed by chance'. It is also due to chance that, in place of Leo Richter, an authoress of crime stories embarks on a reading tour of Central Asia, where she goes missing due to a sequence of unfortunate circumstances: there is no way back...

Unless the author so desires. He alone is able to decide the fate of his characters, whether they live or die. The characters do their best to put him in his place, yet in the end their efforts are all in vain. Kehlmann acts as if he were an artifex divinus, a puppeteer, who has all the strings in his hand, himself laying claim to the anachronistic position of the omniscient, omnipotent narrator.

It was intended to be a 'novel without a main character'. 'A composition, with connections and range, but no protagonist, no continuous hero.' An ambitious experiment in form, in parts thoroughly successful, yet unfortunately, here and there, Kehlmann's slapdash narration lets it down, making the book seem like a rather artificial construction.

Reviewed by Martina Wunderer, February 2009. English translation by Peter Waugh.
Original version: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=1613

[ book info ] Kehlmann, Daniel: Ruhm. (Fame. A Novel in Nine Stories). (original language: Deutsch) Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2009 . ISBN: 978-3-498-03543-3.