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.

The range of information is currently available in five languages: German, English, French, Czech and Hungarian.

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

[ המלצה מאת Incentives ] She thought of the children's astonishment that it was enough to touch one of the large granite stones with a finger. With a child’s hand. And everything began to sway.

The world of the protagonists in Cornelia Travnicek’s new collection of short stories Fütter mich (Feed Me) has been thrown off balance. The veil has been torn, the smooth facade shattered; they are standing at the brink of the abyss. They are fighting to regain their balance, but the threat is not external – it is they themselves. The battleground is the body, their own or that of the other. They torture it with an appalling innocence, cruel like children at play, beyond good and evil.

As stifling as it is fascinating, the atmosphere of insecurity, of the preternatural, is created by Travnicek’s language. Her prose is minimalist, clear, and laconic, but at the same time mysterious, as omissions, the unspeakable, become more powerful than the written word. She aims not at that which is visible, but at that which is concealed. All that is vague, tentative, baffling is not resolved, but passed on to the reader. Even after multiple readings, the stories guard their secret, do not divulge themselves.

And the reader asks no questions; he would rather not – he doesn’t have to know everything, because Travnicek does not force him into the position of a voyeur against his will. Travnicek does not get too close to her characters; she keeps her distance. Her economy of style is due not to taciturnity, but to tactfulness.

As threatening and macabre as Travnicek’s stories are, they are still somehow soothing and moving. For “cloaking the story in secrecy also provides security” – Judith Hermann wrote this about Raymond Carver’s short stories and it holds true for Travnicek’s as well. It is the love of words which envelops and embraces the horror lurking within the stories – long after we have put them down.

Whoever reads for light entertainment, to lose themselves, should therefore leave Fütter mich with its covers closed. But whoever reads to be permanently turned upside down and cast under a spell, should certainly pick up these short stories.

Abbreviated review by Martina Wunderer, September 16, 2009. English translation by Laura Radosh.

Complete version in German: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=7204

[ מידע על ספרים ] Travnicek, Cornelia: Fütter mich. (original language: Deutsch) Skarabaeus, Innsbruck, Wien, Bozen, 2009 . ISBN: 978-3-7082-3272-0.