Home Feed
Home
Search
Search
Add Review, Blurb, Quote
Add
Activity
Activity
Profile
Profile
Weight of Things
Weight of Things | Marianne Fritz
2 posts | 3 read | 2 to read
Fiction. Women's Studies. Translated from the German by Adrian Nathan West. THE WEIGHT OF THINGS is the first book, and the first translated book, and possibly the only translatable book by Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948-2007). For after winning acclaim with this novel awarded the Robert Walser Prize in 1978 she embarked on a 10,000-page literary project called "The Fortress," creating over her lifetime elaborate colorful diagrams and typescripts so complicated that her publisher had to print them straight from her original documents. A project as brilliant as it is ambitious and as bizarre as it is brilliant, it earned her cult status, comparisons to James Joyce no less than Henry Darger, and admirers including Elfriede Jelinek and W. G. Sebald. Yet in this, her first novel, we discover not an eccentric fluke of literary nature but rather a brilliant and masterful satirist, philosophically minded yet raging with anger and wit, who under the guise of a domestic horror story manages to expose the hypocrisy and deep abiding cruelties running parallel, over time, through the society and the individual minds of a century. "Starts out simply and gently and then wades into resonant darkness. A tiny, shattering masterpiece." Brian Evenson "Not an easy read, but surely an important one." Publishers Weekly "A harrowing book about the horrors of motherhood, jealousy, and war trauma." Kirkus"
Amazon Indiebound Barnes and Noble WorldCat Goodreads LibraryThing
review
ReadingEnvy
Weight of Things | Marianne Fritz
post image
Mehso-so

By the time I understood where this was headed it was too late to turn away. Disturbing. And interesting to learn about this author during #womenintranslation month, since this is said to be her only translatable book. It has some hints of the work to come. Part of my Dorothy Publishing Project pile that I bought in a weak moment.

ValerieAndBooks Even the cover feels kind of disturbing! 7y
68 likes1 stack add2 comments
blurb
EliseBlackwell
Weight of Things | Marianne Fritz
post image

Left some money at the Dorothy Project at AWP

ReadingEnvy I'm working my way through their titles this year. They are so beautiful! 8y
9 likes1 comment