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).

http://www.literaturhaus.at

[ Consiglio per un libro di Incentives ]
'Truth is something relative.
And the whole truth all the more so.
There are any number of versions of it.
Some of them are protected by lawyers, others by priests.'

Norbert Gstrein’s latest novel, Die ganze Wahrheit (The Whole Truth), is fiction firmly anchored in reality. It is about versions of truth and interpretations of the world, religious as well as profane, and the plot has numerous parallels in the extra-literary reality of the business of literature: the elderly publisher, Heinrich Glück, marrying for a second time, weds the young and beautiful Dagmar, who, after his death, makes this marriage the subject of a book which, to put it mildly, is unconventional. Facts, myths and rumors are reflected in the basic motive as well as in innumerable details surrounding the former Suhrkamp publisher, Siegfried Unseld, and his second wife, Ulla Berkéwicz, who published her book of mourning Überlebnis (Survival Experience) a few years after the death of her husband.
To read Die ganze Wahrheit simply as a roman-à-clef does not go far enough. Norbert Gstrein plays a much more sophisticated game on various levels. The first-person narrator is a former publishing editor, who falls out with his publisher over her book Death Register. Instead of the death he wants to eternalize the life of the publisher Heinrich Glück. In any case, what matters is not really the publisher himself, but rather his widow, her way of life, her obsessions, her dealings with the publishing house and its employees, her views of the world and her attitudes towards living and being.
The figure of Dagmar is not exactly likeable, but certainly multifaceted. She is a femme fatale with esoteric elements and scheming affectations of power, the kind of woman with whom one can pull entertaining all-nighters. 
We know that we must not equate the narrator with the author, and in this way the author can let his narrator get up to and say all kinds of things, which he would not perhaps sign with his own name. Though perhaps he would. And that is the beauty of this game. The membranes are permeable, for instance when the subject of the publishing house’s dreaded lawyer is addressed on the first pages and the editor, already writing, considers changing the scenes and circumstances of the events, but finally ‘keeps’ the publishing house in Vienna, and, full of self-confidence, thinks he has safeguarded himself. 
What to do with this novel?
It’s quite simple: Read it!

Abbreviated review by Sabine Dengscherz, 9 September 2010.
English translation by Hillary Keel.
Complete version in German: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=7683

[ Informazioni sul libro ] Gstrein, Norbert: Die ganze Wahrheit. (original language: Deutsch) Hanser Verlag, München, 2010 . ISBN: 978-3-446-23549-6.
Traduzione dal Deutsch