An exceptionally gifted talent.--Sächsische Zeitung
Nobody knows exactly what happened in the small town of Klausen, or
rather, everyone knows: a bomb went off on the autobahn, or at a shack
near the autobahn, or someone was shooting at the town from a bridge; it
all stems from a fight over measuring noise pollution on the town
square, or it was the work of eco-terrorists, orItalians. And while
nobody knows who or what to blame--although they're certainly uneasy
about the Moroccan and Albanian immigrants who are squatting in an
abandoned castle--they all suspect that Josef Gasser, who spent several
years away from Klausen, in Berlin, is behind it all. Only one thing is
clear: Klausen was now a crime scene.
In Klausen, Andreas Maier has taken Thomas Bernhard's method--the nested
indirect speech, the repetition, the endless paragraph--and pointed it
at an entire town. A town where one confusion leads to the next, where
everyone is living in a fog of rumor, but where everyone claims to know
exactly what's going on, even if they've changed their story several
times.
Andreas Maier was born in Bad Nauheim outside Frankfurt in 1967. In
addition to winning the Ernst Willner Prize at the Ingeborg Bachmann
Literary Competition in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 2000, he received the
Jürgen Ponto Foundation's Literary Support Prize and the Aspekte
Literary Prize for his first novel Wäldchestag.
Kenneth J. Northcott is a professor emeritus of German at the University
of Chicago. He has translated many books, among them Thomas Bernhard's
The Voice Imitator, Histrionics, and Three Novellas.
