Incentives - New Literature from Austria

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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).

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[ Bogtip efter Incentives ]
The stranger’s real name is Ōhara Tetsu, but the young man on the park bench calls the elegant gentleman simply ‘The Tie’. Milena Michiko Flašar’s novel tells the story of an out-of-work salaried employee in his fifties and a hikkikomori, a young man who has broken off contact with the outside world in order to get away from the norms and expectations of a performance-oriented society.

Day after day the former salaryman and the vagabond hikkimori now ‘occupy’ the same park bench and, as they chat, build up a relationship of trust. The older man tells the younger one how he had been unable to keep pace with the high speed of his company and was eventually given notice. He has, however, not told his wife Kyōko that he has been sacked and, when he leaves the house in the morning, leaves her behind, with her believing that he is going to his office as usual. In this way the facade of Japanese society, which is above all suspicion, is maintained, at least for the time being. The truth is that the former employee who is intent on conforming had departed from the norm years earlier, at the time when his wife had given birth to a handicapped son, whose early death was an event for which the father had been longing.

The young man sitting next to him in the park, who later discloses that he is called Taguchi Hiro, in turn breaks his silence and tells of his classmates and friends who were bullied because they were different from the uniform crowd. Taguchi should have supported them and backed them up, but instead his anxiety led him to distance himself from them.

In the midst of a world of coldness, which, although it may seem exotic, is all too similar to our own, Flašar’s likeable anti-heroes form little islands of humanity. She creates an atmosphere of hope, in which the individual is not reduced to his market value and deviance no longer counts as a blemish. The young writer, who is familar with the cultural world of the Far East, pulls off the trick of giving this confidence momentum, thus providing yet another reason for readers to immerse themselves in this novel of globalization which points the way beyond national sensitivities and the study of languages and literatures.

Abridged from the review by Walter Wagner, February 2012. English translation by Leigh H. Bailey.
Full German text: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=9374

[ Boginfo ] Flašar, Milena Michiko: Ich nannte ihn Krawatte. (original language: German) Wagenbach, Berlin, 2012 . ISBN: 978-3-8031-3241-3.
Oversat fra German