Incentives – la nouvelle littérature d’Autriche

readme.cc propose un accès en plusieurs langues à la littérature autrichienne la plus récente. Réalisée en collaboration avec la Maison de la littérature à Vienne, cette plateforme de lecture offre un aperçu de l’actualité littéraire du pays.

Des critiques littéraires – journalistes et/ou universitaires – présentent des ouvrages qui viennent de paraître, de courts extraits permettent de se faire une première idée, des notices biographiques complètent la présentation.

Pour l’instant, ces informations sont disponibles en cinq langues : allemand, anglais, français, tchèque et hongrois.

Le projet « Incentives » cherche à promouvoir l’internationalisation de la littérature autrichienne et la traduction de textes récents.

Réalisation : centre de documentation pour la nouvelle littérature autrichienne (comptes rendus, notices biographiques) – association des traducteurs (traductions) – readme.cc (infrastructure).

http://www.literaturhaus.at

[ Recommandation de Incentives ] With Crossings, Marlene Streeruwitz has created an anti-modern decadent novel while continuing to follow her now familiar leitmotifs – money, hopelessness, other worlds – in her usual readable way.
In the world of the wealthy Max, everything can be bought and nothing is impossible: 'One has to sit on money, as on a horse. [...] One has to guide money like a good rider, with the reins in the snaffle.'
When his relationship to Lilli, whose name, like that of ‘Helene’ and ‘Margarethe’, is yet another reference to Streeruwitz's own name, breaks down, Max realizes that: 'It was lonely riding money'.

Needing cosmetic dental surgery, Max travels from Vienna to Venice, where he meets the artist Gianni. Afterwards he employs a marriage agency, which puts him in touch with Francesca, 'an Englishwoman from an old-established family, in which the daughters had always been exchanged for money'. In London, he finally takes on a new identity and decides from now on to live as an artist.

Crossings is set in four European cities. Whereas Vienna and Zürich represent inescapable centres of a capitalist society, Venice and London are other worlds, which show that the possibility of change does at least exist.

As in Verführungen (‘Seductions’), Partygirl or Majakowskiring, Streeruwitz’s originality is also expressed on the syntactic level in Crossings. In her Tübingen Lectures on Poetry, the authoress said: 'The complete sentence is a lie'. In contrast to the traditional fragmentary way of narrating, which makes use of natural elliptical patterns of thought, and therefore increases the reading speed, Streeruwitz creates an artistic language, which challenges the reader to pause for a moment and reflect.

(Translated by Peter Waugh)
Abridged review by Christine Schranz, September 2008.
Full-length review

[ Info ] Streeruwitz, Marlene: Kreuzungen. (Crossings). (original language: Deutsch) S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt, 2008 . ISBN: 978-3-10-074434-0.