Lind is a writer--one of the best--who has chosen to speak in a
different tongue. It is amazing that he is witty; it is not at all
surprising that he is profound.--New York Times
Wacholder lives and works at Custom House No. 8 with his adopted son
Aslan and a lodger named Leo. Aslan spends his days copying out the
novels of Kleist, Schiller, Goethe, and Mann; Leo, never leaving his
bed, mentally composes his philosophical masterwork, Placental Theory of
Existence; and Wacholder's only apparent responsibility is keeping watch
over a towering mountain of paper. Wacholder's consuming passion,
however, is his only true friend and nemesis, Würz.
Wüürz hasn't left his home in over seventeen years. He lives there, in a
cocoon of cleanliness and order, with his wife Rita and Rita's two grown
sons, Arnold and Arnulf. Würz has dedicated his life to perfecting his
home and eliminating every last atom of dirt. His happiness is disturbed
only by the letters, 74 in all, Wacholder has sent him over the years.
These letters--dictated by Wacholder, written by Aslan, and full of
every kind of insanity and invective--are intended to smoke Würz out of
his hole, both for his own good and to stop him from plotting against
Wacholder.
When the 74th letter seemingly has no effect, Wacholder turns to other
increasingly outlandish schemes to defeat his rival, even staging a
rally to declare Würz's non-existence. A feverishly comic carnival, Ergo
is Jakov Lind's most experimental work and the final novel he wrote in
German.
Jakov Lind was born in Vienna and survived the Second World War by
fleeing into Germany, where he disguised himself as a Dutch deckhand.
Regarded in his lifetime as a successor to Beckett and Kafka, Lind was
posthumously awarded the Theodor Kramer Prize in 2007.
Ralph Manheim was one of the great translators of the twentieth
century. He translated Günter Grass, Bertolt Brecht, Louis-Ferdinand
Céline, Hermann Hess, Peter Handke, and more. In 1982, PEN American
Center created an award for translation in his name.
