Incentives - New Literature from Austria

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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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Anna Weidenholzer’s eight stories are loosely connected by their characters; the author lets her characteristically laconic style play over the everyday lives of the characters, who have been cheated by life. The resulting linguistically precise flashlights could equally well appear in the commentaries of a small town’s local newspaper. A small town in which the men reminisce in the pub and the women wait in the café, where alcohol briefly consoles them for the leaden weight of the narrow confines of their existence. And where people dream of New York, like Toni the sixty-three-year-old taxi driver, whose life is subject to soothing rituals. At midday he eats a dandelion salad, in the early evening he drinks a whiskey in the pub, and when he drives his taxi at night he likes ‘the emptiness of the streets and the drunkenness of the people, they give him a feeling of superiority.’

Her sense of what is possible, which the author always expresses in the subjunctive mood, helps the protagonists to suppress their slight traumas and sometimes even to come to terms with them. In Toni’s case it is a newspaper photo of his swingers’ club that now moves him to live out his desire for a body more discreetly, and he replies to a contact advertisement by a widow named Herta. However, for her it is not enough to watch her potential partner Toni in a big-city café and see how he is waiting for her to picture them touching and going through rites together.

Hermine, the heroine of the short story ‘Kavkas Butterbrote’ (Kavka’s Sandwiches) is also a widow. The oldest resident in a house divided into flats and the owner of a bitch called Kavka who buries sandwiches, she has already had her name and date of birth inscribed on the gravestone of her deceased husband, beside which she now plants tomatoes.

Slight eccentricities like this are written by the author into all her characters, peculiar habits which at some time or other develop from feelings of hurt or lack of love, but she never lets them become bizarre. In their respective stories the shy protagonists are wrenched out of their impoverished lives and decisions, but a lack of imagination restricts them to being alone, and in the long term they cannot cope with rites and love.

This collection of stories in painstakingly polished prose is an absolutely remarkable debut. For it Anna Weidenholzer was awarded the Author’s Prize of Ministry of the Arts.


Abridged version of the review by Roland Stein, 10 March 2011
Full German text: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=8727

[ book info ] Weidenholzer, Anna: Der Platz des Hundes. Stories. (original language: German) Mitter Verlag, Wels, 2010 . ISBN: 978-3-9502828-0-1.
Translated from German