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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[ Consiglio per un libro di Incentives ] Anthemic Prose
Since Natura morta (2001), Roppongi (2007) and certainly since his new anthemic prose work, no-one in Austrian literature has been able to hold a candle to Büchner Prize winner Josef Winkler. His new poetic narrative prose allows me, an old Winkler reader, to immerse myself in new qualities, although reading his latest book is, paradoxically enough, an experience of return and repetition, a reminiscence of something read before, as if Winkler were constantly writing the same.
That is something which he both does and does not do. The original appeal of all Winkler's texts lies in the 'poeticisation of exotic immediacy'. Let me explain: ever since his trilogy Das wilde Kärnten ('Wild Carinthia'), Winkler's prose has been nourished by the autobiographical experience of the Carinthian border, by a childhood and youth spent on the periphery, in a geographical, social and mental sense. Wild Carinthia is an exotic world and Josef Winkler's childhood experiences are borderline experiences. (All German-language literature lives from the fact that its great authors, such as Grass, Bachmann or Handke bring their primary socialisation on the exotic borderland of a language region into the wasteland scenery of a centre.) Winkler continues to develop his childhood themes, taking them step by step into new spheres. With every repetition, the Carinthian exoticism undergoes narrative expansion, gains in poetic depth and enters into new relationships with the global exoticism of Winkler the globetrotter (in Sicily, Rome, India and Mexico).
In the new books, in particular the last one, the autobiographical trail of the narrative, as it follows what the 'I' has seen with its own eyes and heard with its own eyes and experienced with its own body, is supplemented by a new line of intertextuality, one that is both literary and cinematic. Taken together, Winkler's books constitute an extraordinary development novel: they trace a path from the 'pure idiot', the farmer's boy, the autodidact, to the well-read writer who fondly plays with his erudition in world literature in his texts, and his evolution into a professor of poetics and transformation into a poeta doctus. This astonishing path has never been more beautifully documented than in Ich reiß mir eine Wimper aus und stech dich damit tot. In this book, two worlds are perfectly entwined with each other: the world of the immediacy of personal experience and self-observation, and the world of literature and film.

English translation by Peter Waugh.
Abbreviated review by Walter Fanta, May 2009.
Original version: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=7227

[ Informazioni sul libro ] Winkler, Josef : Ich reiß mir eine Wimper aus und stech dich damit tot.. (I Pull out an Eyelid and Stab You To Death). (original language: Deutsch) Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M., 2008 . ISBN: 978-3-518-12556-4.