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Rilke's prayerful responses to the french master's beseeching art
For a long time nothing, and then suddenly one has the right eyes.
Virtually every day in the fall of 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke returned to a Paris gallery to view a Cezanne exhibition. Nearly as frequently, he wrote dense and joyful letters to his wife, Clara Westhoff, expressing his dismay before the paintings and his ensuing revelations about art and life.
Rilke was knowledgeable about art and had even published monographs, including a famous study of Rodin that inspired his New Poems. But Cezanne's impact on him could not be conveyed in a traditional essay. Rilke's sense of kinship with Cezanne provides a powerful and prescient undercurrent in these letters -- passages from them appear verbatim in Rilke's great modernist novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Letters on Cezanne is a collection of meaningfully private responses to a radically new art.
One didn't dare to inhale for fear of breathing it in. It was the
sound of eighteen hundred airplanes approaching Hamburg from the
south at an unimaginable height. We had already experienced two
hundred or even more air raids, among them some very heavy ones,
but this was something completely new. And yet there was an
immediate recognition: this was what everyone had been waiting for,
what had hung for months like a shadow over everything we did,
making us weary. It was the end. Novelist Hans Erich Nossack was
forty-two when the Allied bombardments of German cities began, and
he watched the destruction of Hamburg--the city where he was born
and where he would later die--from across its Elbe River. He heard
the whistle of the bombs and the singing of shrapnel; he watched
his neighbors flee; he wondered if his home--and his
manuscripts--would survive the devastation. The End is his terse,
remarkable memoir of the annihilation of the city, written only
three months after the bombing. A searing firsthand account of one
of the most notorious events of World War II, The End is also a
meditation on war and hope, history and its devastation. And it is
the rare book, as W. G. Sebald noted, that describes the Allied
bombing campaign from the German perspective. In the first
English-language edition of The End, Nossack's text has been
crisply translated by Joel Agee and is accompanied by the
photographs of Erich Andres. Poetic, evocative, and yet highly
descriptive, The End will prove to be, as Sebald claimed, one of
the most important German books on the firebombing of that country.
A small but critical book, something to read in those quiet moments
when we wonder what will happen next.--Susan Salter Reynolds, Los
Angeles Times
The Swiss writer Friedrich Durrenmatt (1921-90) was one of the most
important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth
century. During the years of the cold war, arguably only Beckett,
Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European
letters. Yet outside Europe, this prolific author is primarily
known for only one work, "The Visit," With these long-awaited
translations of his plays, fictions, and essays, Durrenmatt becomes
available again in all his brilliance to the English-speaking
world.
Durrenmatt's essays, gathered in this third volume of "Selected
"Writings, are among his most impressive achievements. Their range
alone is astonishing: he wrote with authority and charm about art,
literature, philosophy, politics, and the theater. The selections
here include Durrenmatt's best-known essays, such as "Theater
Problems" and "Monster Essay on Justice and Law," as well as the
notes he took on a 1970 journey in America (in which he finds the
United States "increasingly susceptible to every kind of fascism").
This third volume of "Selected Writings "also includes essays that
shade into fiction, such as "The Winter War in Tibet," a fantasy of
a third world war waged in a vast subterranean labyrinth--a Plato's
Cave allegory rewritten for our own troubled times.
Durrenmatt has long been considered a great writer--but one
unfairly neglected in the modern world of letters. With these
elegantly conceived and expertly translated volumes, a new
generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.
A respected professor is dead - shot in a crowded Zurich
restaurant, in front of dozens of witnesses. The murderer calmly
turned himself in to the police. So why has he now hired a lawyer
to clear his name? And why has he chosen the drink-soaked,
disreputable Spat to defend him? As he investigates, Spat finds
himself obsessed, drawn ever deeper into a case of baffling
complexity until he reaches a deadly conclusion: justice can be
restored only by a crime. This is a captivating neo-noir classic
from the master of the genre. The Execution of Justice is a dark,
wicked satire on the legal system and a disturbing, if ambivalent,
allegory on guilt, justice, violence and morality.
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Suspicion (Paperback)
Friedrich Durrenmatt; Translated by Joel Agee
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R272
R219
Discovery Miles 2 190
Save R53 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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INSPECTOR BARLACH HAS A YEAR TO LIVE, BUT HE'S NOT GOING QUIETLY
When Inspector Barlach notices that a successful Swiss surgeon
bears a striking resemblance to an infamous Nazi war criminal, a
suspicion begins to gnaw away at him - could they be one and the
same person? Determined to expose the monster behind the surgeon's
mask, the ailing inspector checks himself into the doctor's
exclusive clinic. But all does not go to plan, and soon Barlach
realizes that he is at the mercy of his own prey. Will he find a
way out before it's too late? Suspicion is a dark mystery about a
dying man's struggle to destroy a wickedness
From one of the preeminent intellectual figures of the twentieth
century, a highly personal testimonial of what Canetti himself
chooses to term "notations," bits and pieces: notes, aphorisms,
fragments. Taken together, they present an awesomely tender,
guiltily gloomy meditation on death and aging.
Joel Agee, the son of James Agee, was raised for twelve years in
East Germany, where his stepfather, the novelist Bodo Uhse, was a
member of the privileged communist intelligentsia. This is the
story of how young Joel failed to become a good communist, becoming
instead a fine writer.
"A wonderfully evocative memoir. . . . Agee evoked for me the
atmosphere of postwar Berlin more vividly than the actual
experience of it--and I was there." --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt,
"New York Times"
"One of those rare personal memoirs that brings to life a whole
country and an epoch." --Christopher Isherwood
"Twelve Years consists of a series of finely honed anecdotes
written in a precise, supple prose rich with sensual detail."
--David Ghitelman, "Newsday"
"By turns poetic and picturesque, Agee energetically catalogues his
expatriate passage to manhood with a pinpoint eye and a healthy
American distaste for pretension. . . . Huckleberry Finn would have
. . . welcomed [him] as a soulmate on the raft." --J. D. Reed,
"Time"
"A triumph. . . . Unfettered by petty analysis or quick
explanations, a story that is timeless and ageless and vital."
--Robert Michael Green, "Baltimore Sun"
A genre-bending mystery recalling the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet
and anticipating the postmodern fictions of Paul Auster and other
contemporary neo-noir novelists. Inspector Barlach forgoes the
arrest of a murderer in order to manipulate him into killing
another, more elusive criminal. This is a thriller that brings
existential philosophy and the detective genre into dazzling
convergence
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The Pledge (Paperback)
Friedrich Durrenmatt; Translated by Joel Agee
1
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R303
R244
Discovery Miles 2 440
Save R59 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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"'It's a promise, Frau Moser,' the inspector said, impelled solely
by the desire to leave this place. "'On your eternal salvation?'
"The inspector hesitated. 'On my eternal salvation,' he finally
said. What else could he do? When a young girl is found brutally
murdered in a Swiss mountain forest, the brilliant Inspector
Matthai can't put the case behind him. Not even when a local felon
is arrested. Not even once the suspect has confessed. Matthai
promises the girl's mother that he will stop at nothing to find the
real killer. Adapted into a Hollywood film, The Pledge is the
chilling story of a man in desperate search of the truth. A man
driven to sacrifice everything, to commit acts of cruelty and
obsession in a desperate search for a killer he can't find.
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