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).

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[ book tip by Incentives ] Friederike Mayröcker’s latest book publication, auspiciously entitled Paloma, comprises 99 letters to an addressee who is not known by name. However, the recipient, addressed as 'Dear friend', is not unknown to insiders. This literary love monologue, which can of course be thought of as a constant dialogue, is dedicated to her life companion and poeticising alter ego, Ernst Jandl, who died too early yet is still not absent.

The writer candidly reports of the everyday fear of losing her mind, or even of forfeiting her creative powers. Paloma deals with the painstaking process of growing old and bidding farewell, without however seeking for euphemistic phrases. When the so-called evening of life passes into the night of life, many memories arise, yet there is little comfort, but if – like Mayröcker – we are lucky, then what remains is a passion, in which life and work have become eternally connected to each other. Nothing could present this hunger more impressively than the marked antithesis of 'things are coming to an end, it is a lovely spring'.

An elegiac undertone unquestionably accompanies these letters, to which only one reply can be expected, namely that of an audience that does not lust after an entertaining read, but is prepared to get into illness, loneliness and loss, at least on a literary level. After all, the author does not practise any discreet restraint, rather she dares to call her fears and infirmities by name.

This volume appears to maintain a balance between the heavy and the light. In the process, human beings and books carry considerable weight, above all the friend, who is at once the dearest and the most precious one. When Mayröcker, in her apparitional narrative style, refers to André Breton’s letters to Gala, or Petrarch’s love poems to Laura, then she is indicating what we have long suspected: that the touching, tender prose of Paloma testifies to an affection, the exclusiveness of which could not be more plainly paraphrased than this: '[...] No-one will ever be able or allowed to take HIS place.'

Review by Walter Wagner, February 2009. English translation by Peter Waugh
Original version: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=2027

[ book info ] Mayröcker, Friederike: Paloma. (original language: Deutsch) Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/Main, 2008 . ISBN: 978-3-518-41956-4.