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).

http://www.literaturhaus.at

[ Bogtip efter Incentives ] The three novellas in Von den Himmel compose a literary “triptych” on the theme of fault and failure. Taking the art history term for a three-paneled (altar) picture literally, we can visualize three tableaus; in the middle is Alberta Perlmutt in a large meadow, a dog by her side. The trees and grass blue; the sky grey from converging clouds. On the panel to the left is the artist N., falling into the picture, sliding on an avalanche; to the right is the stonemason Lamper, who has run into a mirrored surface in the middle of the woods.

The author’s highly individual imagery easily facilitates this vision. The connections between these “pictures” become clear only when events have run their course. Until then, the reader has the detective’s pleasure of following the author to sites attractive not for their idyllic qualities, but for their insidiousness: a sanatorium, an atelier, a Roman well, an abandoned village. At these sites, power plays between man and woman emerge that develop into imaginative variations as the book progresses. Within the individual novellas, similar motifs flash like lightning within the artful construction: The male protagonists use women’s bodies for the creation of their art and react to women’s inaccessibility or unpredictability with destructive rage. The whole story about why the artist N. is fleeing from a mental institution, why the jogging stonemason Lamper kidnaps a woman he doesn’t know, and how the female counterparts develop from victim to avenger and– in the case of the seamstress Alberta Perlmutt – to discerning visionary, is not unraveled until the third part.

The theme of fault and failure is taken up with a refreshing love of verbal experimentation and packaged in the play of innumerous artful interconnections – even the most complex method of painting could not provide as much originality as Gabriele Petricek’s writing.


Abbreviated review by Silvia Sand. English translation by Laura Radosh.
Complete version in German: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=7449

[ Boginfo ] Petricek, Gabriele: Von den Himmeln. Triptychon. (original language: Deutsch) Sonderzahl, Wien, 2009 . ISBN: 978-3-85449-323-5.