An astonishing and fantastical autobiographical novel --
reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Laurence Sterne -- "The System of
Vienna" details Jonke's travels through Vienna by streetcar,
reporting the bizarre and frustrating encounters he experiences as
he progresses -- and meanwhile moving not just from trolley-stop to
trolley-stop, but through life as well, from innocence to
disillusionment, birth to death. Jonke meets a paranoiac fish
wholesaler who believes he is directing all of Austrian politics
from his little stall, a stamp collector in such deadly earnest he
hopes to be appointed to a professorship in philately, and a
compulsive talker who has developed a rigorous economic philosophy
out of the most common objects to be found in a Vienna
neighborhood. Slowly increasing the comic and fantastic elements in
his story until they overwhelm all pretense to autobiography --
culminating in a strangely touching love scene between Jonke and a
caryatid -- "The System of Vienna" reminds us that the very act of
describing a life turns it into fiction.
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