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 ]
In the tradition of literary dystopias such as George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Thomas Sautner bitingly describes a fictitious society in an unspecified location in the future. This genre of the anti-utopia is characterized by the outline of an authoritarian or totalitarian regime completely equipped with a comprehensive and repressive function for monitoring society. As a reward for civil obedience, the state guarantees the provision of care and security: “The Caring Mom Program – protection, warmth and a feeling of security in a dangerous, cold and unfeeling time” is the propaganda slogan of the new government, to which Sautner’s main character, Jack Blind, belongs as the right-hand man of the president, Mike Forell. Jack, a strict conformist, is convinced that dissent and individuality are evil and works on strategies to wipe them out once and for all.

For his own good and the good of the public at large, the individual should be deprived of the right to make any decisions. “My dream is to make life better for the country and its people,” Jack explains at the beginning of the novel to his skeptical sister Gwendolyn. “Do you still not realize that we live in a dictatorship, a dictatorship, which takes life from us, which takes our own self away?” she says in an attempt to open her brother’s eyes. But Jack stands by the prevailing political system and refuses to entertain any doubt – until he experiences for himself the arbitrariness of the supposed Rule of Law.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” This quote by Goethe, which is chosen as a motto, sounds almost like a warning. It is because Fremdes Land (Strange Country) is uncannily familiar, the development toward the transparent citizen today already being well advanced. It is precisely the fact that the story is set within the horizon of the reader’s experience that is this book’s strength and that turns dealing with this fiction into a riveting experience.

Abbreviated review by Martina Wunderer, October 2010.
English translation by Hillary Keel. 
Complete version in German: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=7791

[ book info ] Sautner, Thomas: Fremdes Land. (original language: Deutsch) Aufbau Verlag, Berlin, 2010 .