Herbert Achternbusch

A selection of filmbooks and plays by the Bavarian writer, painter, and filmmaker Herbert Achternbusch, translated into English for the first time. The volume includes the titles: The Comanche, Susn, Kuschwarda City, The Olympic Champion, The Last Hole, and The Idiot. The works are tragicomic, anarchistic, and absurdist in flavour, always more or less inexorably returning to a local Bavarian milieu which the works nevertheless portray in an ambivalent, critical manner, thus placing the particular in the context of a more universal kind of humanism. From the description on the publisher's website: "The filmbooks tend to operate in the mode of dialogue in concert with pointed descriptions of scenes, gestures, and actions (Achternbusch also had a penchant for physical comedy); the plays tend toward the more intimate mode of monologue framed by stripped-down, largely expressive or symbolic settings. Both forms remain experimental and exploratory, their narrative threads always shifting from beginning to end. They present stylistically, tonally distinct iterations of two of Achternbusch’s major gifts as a storyteller: that of constructing an engaging, coherent narrative around wildly absurd premises, and that of developing a broad range of thoughts and emotions without ever breaking the comic mold which energizes the whole and binds it together like a special kind of glue."