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.

A composer who has already given up composing -- because of his inability to notate the music of the spheres -- becomes increasingly fixated on capturing a mysterious, eerie, distant sound, which he soon equates with all the things he desires most: the perfect woman, the perfect city, the perfect work of art. Obsessed with his impossible quest, the man breaks out of the asylum and begins a series of comic, dreamlike, and ultimately haunting adventures as he tries to locate the source of the sound that consumes him... and instead finds the root cause of all his failures.

An innovative satire on the process by which bureaucracy and official regimentation insidiously pervade society. In a deadpan, pseudo-scientific tone, the nameless narrator takes us on a tour of a bizarre village whose inhabitants lead such habitual, regulated lives that they resemble elements in a mathematical equation.

Writing from his background as a conservatory-trained musician and his lifelong passion Gert Jonke (born in 1946) has produced literary works in every genre involving the lives and works of various composers. This volume includes four pieces in several forms -- a prose poem in tribute to Olivier Messiaen's great piano work "Catalogue d'oiseaux", which gives the title to the piece; a short story in the form of recollections by George Frederick Handel during the last hours of his life; a play (Gentle Rage) in which Ludwig van Beethoven figures as the alternately despondent and triumphant main character; and a novella whose point of departure is the bizarre, accidental shooting death of Anton Webern in 1945 (Blinding Moment).