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 ] Finzens and Fiat make up an all-male household that stands on wobbly financial legs; while Finzens, who is from Bulgaria, at least has a steady income – his job is to keep the peace in the unnamed city’s cathedral – Fiat, who hails from the Austrian countryside, lives from begging in the trains, professing to be a suffering Romanian. The two want to hit big money with a “business idea” that makes use of an Indonesian civet, having received vague information that these four-legged cat-like jungle animals eat coffee beans and that the coffee beans found in their feces have been refined and carry a distinctive flavor.

The setting and foundation of the novel’s action are recognizable as our known world with its precarious working conditions, its consciousness destroyed by the media, its ethics destroyed by advertising, its will to exist destroyed by the market, and its constraints of survival that determine our actions; but the protagonists’ actions, which seemingly follow these constraints, are completely subversive to reality, law, and the market. The novel is a fitting chronicle of the social and economic situation of today’s generation of young people in Europe. Fiat and Finzens, as representatives of this generation, are torn between dubious employment, nebulous projects, and unrealistic dreams. The surreal sprinklings should be read as escape routes from a puny and fragile reality; the absurdity at every corner can be seen as a gesture of subversive resistance against our economic and social order in the crisis following the financial crisis. Botany and zoology fulfill their function perfectly: a postcolonial flair emanates from the encyclopedic descriptions of forty varieties of coffee and the rare exotic animal species Paradoxus hermaphroditus – both objects of the globalized exploitation of nature.

The narrative form is restricted to the most essential. Effortlessness segues into undemanding prose that uses simple narrative in the present tense and colloquial language. The dialogues are stereotypical, but the stereotype fits the characters’ consciousness and serves the aim of this story: to reach the people that this novel is about.

Abbreviated review by Walter Fanta, April 2010. English translation by Laura Radosh.
Complete version in German: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=7298

[ book info ] Grill, Andrea: Das Schöne und das Notwendige. (original language: Deutsch) Otto Müller Verlag, Salzburg, 2010 . ISBN: 978-3-7013-1169-9.