All guests of the European Literature Days from 2009 to 2014.

[ Consiglio per un libro di Christine Rigler ] The theory that great literature can only emerge in periods of historical transition is brilliantly borne out by the novel “Zwölf Ringe” (“Twelve Rings”) by the Ukrainian author, Juri Andruchowytsch. Here, a kind of Carnival appetite is revealed for the absurd, perverse, broken and comic elements of a society in chaos. Here, the author unravels unbelievably colourful language, which penetrates every abyss in a hopeless world, like a beam of torchlight reaching into every crevice and illuminating the trash. The story starts quite harmlessly with a trip in the early 1990s to the Ukraine by Viennese photographer, Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen. Things visibly transform into a kind of decaying still life which is simultaneously a clever allegory for unbridled capitalism. Incidentally, Zumbrunnen, a slightly naive photojournalist – and this is a brief résumé of the book – falls victim to his blind love for the Ukraine. In recent years, Juri Andruchowytsch has been acclaimed mainly for his essays. We can only hope that Sabine Stöhr will just as brilliantly translate into German Andruchowytsch‟s three other novels, written between 1992 and 1999.

[ Informazioni sul libro ] Andruchowytsch, Juri: Zwölf Ringe. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 2005 . ISBN: 3518416812.