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 ] The title of this first book, which is extraordinary both as far as its content and its language are concerned, derives from the fluorescent substance of glowworms. The short protagonist Lucy collects them for propagation purposes in jars and dries the corpses in order to preserve their light for herself. A light that consoles her and helps her to get through the hard winter, a light in which Lucifer snatches away the terror of the night.

Proceeding from John Berger’s story 'The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol', Angelika Rainer’s dwarf who has been cast out by her family and village persists with a distant love, through the strength of which she manages to attain real life.

While glowworms signal their readiness to couple at dusk, Lucy’s lonely nights are filled with a desire for any signals that she can wrest from nature. Separated from her ‘Philemon’ for a third spring, she carries manure to the fields, hay from the field and heat-giving peat to her austere abode: the ruin of a rectangular yarded farmhouse at the foot of an Alpine mountain. Nobody visits her and she skins her hares alone, drinks wine, eats chocolate and smokes self-rolled cigarettes to the 'music of the minor planets'.

The author, who is also a harpist, was born in Lienz in 1971. In her highly musical and vivid language, she contrasts the microcosm of natural sensations with Lucy’s visit to a village festival, where the outsider is once again shunned by the community.

This dark Alpine enclave is no beautiful country, so that Rainer assigns further associations to this woman consumed with a longing for light, and interlaces geographical and partly mythical references with her visionary song.

The authoress only hints at the previous story of the picture collector Lucy, and many of her of natural and psychodramatic reconstructions provide further scope for interpretation. Some motifs remain obscure or baffling, but nevertheless this comprehensive lyrical portrait, which is barely 80 pages long, and is enriched by quotations ranging from Friederike Mayröcker to Ovid, achieves a great density. Angelika Rainer has created a rare example of precisely composed literature, whilst making it possible to empathise with her protagonist, thereby opening up the reader's own store of images.

Review by Roland Steiner, Februaryy2009. English translation by Peter Waugh
Original version: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=2412

[ book info ] Rainer, Angelika: Luciferin. (Luciferess). (original language: Deutsch) Haymon, Innsbruck, Wien, 2008 . ISBN: 978-3-85218-560-6.