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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[ Knjižni namig pošilja Incentives ] "You know what the worst of all bug-eyed things is: letters packed in boxes, lying lie there on the bottom shelf, simply the fact that they don’t just vanish into thin air."
Andrea Winkler dedicated her second prose work, which is published by Droschl Verlag in Graz, "To those who set out in search of rest". Hanna und Ich is the simple title of the volume, although even that hints at something more complicated: an interpersonal relationship.
To list the contents of a book is an obsolete undertaking, and one which in this case cannot do justice to the concept of an author who artfully disavows every attempt at interpretation outright. Little can be stated with certainty anyway: it is about Hanna, who has a shop that sells books, where various people repeatedly come to visit: Lea, a friend of hers, Rio, a young man with whom she seems to be having a love affair, although it might also be in the past, and Mr Emm, an elderly man who walks up and down on the street outside. Then there is also the first-person narrator, who is worried about Hanna, from whom we learn that Hanna has recently been behaving very "strangely": she never leaves the house and hardly says a word.
The narrator does not know the reason for her transformation: "I don’t understand what has changed between us, nor why Hanna has lost all faith in the little place below the attic window." In this way, the novel becomes a search for a lost state, for clues to a person who has decided to disappear. It is not as if there is no story, one has the feeling that many things happen between the characters, sometimes even outrageous things, yet everything is narrated in the gaps in between. It seems as if Winkler is concerned to make the narrative as blurred as possible. Yet what can be narrated if one can no longer narrate?
With Hanna und Ich, Winkler succeeds in conducting a remarkable experiment. In this development novel about a state of standstill she is formally ambitious and experimental and yet still manages to tell a story. She gives expression to the experience of alienation, of arbitrariness and the lack of a past, against the backdrop of a modern Kafkaesque context of work and interpersonal relationships. In presenting us with Hanna’s refusal, she demonstrates what happens to all of us, thereby creating a literary space for a fundamental sense of unease in a flexible, interchangeable world.

English translation by Peter Waugh.
Abbreviated review by Sigrid Meßner, 25 February 2009.
Original version

[ Informacije ] Winkler, Andrea: Hanna und ich. (original language: Deutsch) Literaturverlag Droschl, Graz / Wien, 2008 . ISBN: 9783854207382.