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 ] Ruhm (‘Fame’) is the laconic title of the new book by best-selling author Daniel Kehlmann. Its subtitle proclaims it to be 'A Novel in Nine Stories' and indeed the individual stories are skilfully connected to one another. Following a complex blueprint, Kehlmann transports his characters and readers to a labyrinthine hall of mirrors, playing a post-modern game of mise-en-abyme – 'Stories within stories within stories'. The stakes are high: questions of identity, of reality and fiction, of the significance of the relationship between reality and literature, of the work of art in an age of the internet and mobile phone, and of the possibilities which these new media open up with regard to anonymity, changes of identity and double lives.

The technician Ebling suddenly begins to receive phone calls which – due to some mistake in the allocation of telephone numbers – are actually intended for the film star Ralf Tanner. For a short time, Ebling is therefore able to escape from his everyday life and believe in the illusion that 'Ralf’s being had always been intended for him' and that 'their two fates had only been reversed by chance'. It is also due to chance that, in place of Leo Richter, an authoress of crime stories embarks on a reading tour of Central Asia, where she goes missing due to a sequence of unfortunate circumstances: there is no way back...

Unless the author so desires. He alone is able to decide the fate of his characters, whether they live or die. The characters do their best to put him in his place, yet in the end their efforts are all in vain. Kehlmann acts as if he were an artifex divinus, a puppeteer, who has all the strings in his hand, himself laying claim to the anachronistic position of the omniscient, omnipotent narrator.

It was intended to be a 'novel without a main character'. 'A composition, with connections and range, but no protagonist, no continuous hero.' An ambitious experiment in form, in parts thoroughly successful, yet unfortunately, here and there, Kehlmann's slapdash narration lets it down, making the book seem like a rather artificial construction.

Reviewed by Martina Wunderer, February 2009. English translation by Peter Waugh.
Original version: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=1613

[ Info ] Kehlmann, Daniel: Ruhm. (Fame. A Novel in Nine Stories). (original language: Deutsch) Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2009 . ISBN: 978-3-498-03543-3.