The System of Vienna: From Heaven Street to Earth Mound Square

by Gert Jonke, Vincent Kling (Translator)

Overview

Half philosopher and half clown-prince, Gert Jonke is Austria s comic gift to contemporary fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564785503
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	12/03/2009
Series:	German and Austrian Literature Series
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	125
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Gert Jonke is counted among Austria's most important authors and dramatists. Among other prizes, he received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, the Erich Fried Prize, and the Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature. He died in 2009 at the age of 62.

Vincent Kling is professor of German and comparative literature at La Salle Universityin Philadelphia.

What People are Saying About This

Elfriede Jelinek

He played with language like a child with soap bubbles, but the bubbles contained extremely refined and precise thought instead of air. (Elfriede Jelinek, author of The Piano Teacher and Greed)

Ronald Pohl

In wild thunderstorms of language Jonke released a nearly indescribable energy with power enough to topple the whole world . . . He was the heir to such disparate ancestors as Borges and Robert Walser.

Editorial Reviews

Gert Jonke was one of the great innovators of late 20th and early 21st Century literature and, for the English-speaking world, each additional translated work is more supporting evidence that Jonke’s place is secure.

Josh Maday - The Collagist

The System of Vienna, with its commanding cadences, self-absorbed insistence, and entrancing repetitions, not to mention its childlike surrender to fantasy, is boundless fiction that both puzzles and entertains.”

John Madera - The Millions

In wild thunderstorms of language Jonke released a nearly indescribable energy with power enough to topple the whole world . . . He was the heir to such disparate ancestors as Borges and Robert Walser.

Ronald Pohl

He played with language like a child with soap bubbles, but the bubbles contained extremely refined and precise thought instead of air.

Elfriede Jelinek

In these reconstituted, previously published stories, late experimental author Jonke (1946–2009) deploys a literary alter ego to take readers on a tortuous, playful journey through memories of Vienna, the author and hero's native city. Interlinked tales, crafted in ambling sentences, follow the protagonist (born, like Jonke, in 1946) recreating moments from his childhood and young adulthood with sensuous precision: riding the streetcars through Vienna's numerous districts; studying musicology at the University of Vienna; and meeting an array of city workers, from a sculptor who lectures on the deceptions of his craft to a wholesale fish dealer who claims to have more power than the chancellor. The narrator also communes, extensively, with caryatids and atlantes, human-shaped statuary that serves as support in prominent Viennese architecture. Often mimicking his hero's existential paralysis with circuitous text, Jonke strikes out in the direction of the fantastic and absurd, revealing unexpected meaning in the vibrancy of Viennese life. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

In Austria, Jonke's award-winning Geometric Regional Novel has a reputation for being extremely difficult; outside, he is still virtually unknown. His new book is both a collection of short stories (originally and disparately published in 1970 and 1980) and an inventive autobiographical novel. The first-person narrator details his travels on the streetcars of Vienna and through life, starting with his blue-skinned birth and ending with a stony love scene, belatedly explaining the book's subtitle. Translator Kling's (German & comparative literature, La Salle Univ.) attentiveness to Jonke's use of language—long, intentionally confused sentences, repetition, and fantastically superlative compound words like "darkgreenblackcreepingplantalgaemurky" (a descriptor for canal water)—helps retain the book's balance as well as its complexity. VERDICT This slim volume is not an easy read, and, while Kling's afterword does make it a bit more accessible, readers who aren't into experimental fiction may want to skip this one.—Karen Walton Morse, Univ. at Buffalo Libs.

Library Journal