Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture, and Thought Translation Series

"Renate Welsh's novel is a story about a woman's unsuccessful quest to build a home, to determine an identity. It is based on family documents of the author's great-great-grandfather, a representative in the Frankfurt consitutive Assembly and one of the leaders of the failed revolution of 1848 in Germany. He and his son eventually emigrated to the United States. The writings and correspondence of these two men appear in their original form in the novel, indicated by italics. The female protagonist, Pauline, is married to the son. There are no letters preserved from her, so the author lends Pauline a voice and attempts to correct an injustic done to this woman of the nineteenth century, the injustice of misunderstanding her, of forgetting her, or of never having taken note of her in the first place. Welsh rejects an omnipotent narrative perspective and instead engages in a conversaion with her protagonist. The two very different voices are layered one upon the other in the novel, and their juxtaposition creates a formal dialogic structure. Welsh situates the documentary materials within a fictional context. Thus fiction stands side by side with fact, subjective conjecture with objective statement. Pauline's story ends in insanity in 1855."--BOOK JACKET.

"A complex and ambitious novel which centres on the life of the Elizabethan magus John Dee, in England, Poland and Prague, as it intertwines past and present, dreams and visions, myth and reality in a world of the occult, culminating in the transmutation of physical reality into a higher spiritual existence." "John Dee, through his 20th century descendent, is led by the Green Angel to the "Other Side of The Mirror."" --Book Jacket.

"Philipp Erlach ist (wie so viele) seiner Familie gegenüber ein Totalverweigerer. Als ausgerechnet er die alte Villa seiner Großeltern erbt, will er seine Erinnerung ebenso austreiben wie die Tauben unterm Dach. Drei Generationen einer Familie sind siebzig Jahre Geschichte und siebzig Jahre Lebensgeschichten"--Jacket.

Menschlicher noch als bei Homer geht es in Inge Merkels Roman Eine ganz gewöhnliche Ehe zu. Als gehörten Odysseus und Penelope nicht zu den klassischen Gestalten der griechischen Sagenwelt, lassen sie sich gehen, verletzen sie einander, bereiten sich gegenseitig Kummer und Verzweiflung und finden doch Kraft für Verzeihen und Verständnis. »Wirklich zu Hause kann ein Mann nur sein«, heißt es von Odysseus nach zwanzigjähriger Abwesenheit von Weib und Sohn, »wenn er von irgendwo zurückgekommen ist.«

"In turn of the century Vienna the impoverished, foreign-born Stanislaus Demba, who earns his keep as a tutor of the children of the professional class, must urgently come up with two hundred crowns to take his girlfriend Sonja Hartmann to Italy in order to prevent her from going with the well-off law student Georg Weiner. In a series of highly humorous and intricately-connected vignettes the Czech-born Leo Perutz, himself an immigrant to Vienna, sends the enigmatic and generally unsympathetic Demba cascading through the city in his quest to obtain the needed money even as he strives to conceal his shameful secret. Besides offering a satire of contemporary life in his characterization of the petty bourgeoisie and the upper class, university professors and intellectuals, gallants and flirts, and gamblers and high-class thieves, Between Nine and Nine (1918) also sheds light on the forces that conditioned identity in fin-de-siecle Vienna: industrialization, misogyny, anti-Semitism, classism, and xenophobia. Through the modern, indeterminate narrative stance, the novel, originally entitled "Freedom" in its serialized version, ultimately depicts the contingency of self-determination and identity in a complex social milieu. On display in Between Nine and Nine are the author's skills as storyteller and caricaturist; his subtle and satiric humor; his highly refined apathetic sensibilities, and his insightful social commentary. Readers unfamiliar with Leo Perutz will find him delightfully provocative."--Jacket.