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In the years before the Second World War, a man throws a statue of
the crucified Christ over a waterfall. Later, in Hitler's trenches,
he loses his arms to an enemy grenade. The blasphemer, screaming in
agony, presided over by Satan, who pours a cup of gall into his
open mouth, is portrayed amid the flames of Hell in a painting by
the parish priest that is mounted on a calvary where the two
streets in the cross-shaped village meet. Thus begins When the Time
Comes, Josef Winkler's chronicle of life in rural Austria written
in the form of a necrology, tracing the benighted destiny of a
community through its suicides and the tragic deaths that befall
it, punctuated by the invocation of the bone-cooker whose viscous
brew is painted on the faces of the work horses and the haunting
stanzas of Baudelaire's "Litanies of Satan." In a hypnotic,
incantatory prose reminiscent at times of Homer, at times of the
Catholic liturgy, at times of the naming of the generations in the
book of Genesis, When the Time Comes is a ruthless dissection of
the pastoral novel, laying bare the corruption that lies in its
heart. Writing in the vein of his compatriots Peter Handke, and
Elfriede Jelinek, but perhaps going further in his relentlessness
and aesthetic radicalism, Josef Winkler is one of the most
significant European authors working today.
White peaches, red broom, pomegranates tumbling down the escalator
steps: with these delicately rendered details, Josef Winkler's
Natura Morta begins. In Stazione Termini in Rome, Piccoletto, the
beautiful black-haired boy whose long eyelashes graze his
freckle-studded cheeks, steps onto the metro and heads toward his
job at a fish stand in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. The sights and
sounds of the market, a melange of teeming life amid the ever
present avatars of death, is the backdrop for Winkler's innovative
prose, which unfolds in a series of haunting images and baroque,
luxuriant digressions with pitch-perfect symmetry and intense
visual clarity. Reminiscent of the carnal vitality of Pasolini, and
taking inspiration from the play between the sumptuous and fatal in
the still lives of the late Renaissance, Natura Morta is a unique
experiment in writing as stasis, culminating in the beatification
of its protagonist. In awarding this book with the 2001 Alfred
Doblin Prize, Gunter Grass singled out Winkler's commitment to the
writer's vocation and praised Natura Morta as a work of dense
poetic rigor. "Magnificent. A poetic study of the transience of
being. A deeply sensuous book." - Marcel Reich-Ranicki "A hypnotic
novel." - Edmund White
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book
may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages,
poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the
original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We
believe this work is culturally important, and despite the
imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of
our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works
worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in
the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields
in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as
an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification:
++++ Lehrbuch Des Kirchenrechts, Mit Besonderer Rucksicht Auf Die
Schweiz: Nebst Einem Anhange Josef Winkler Raber, 1862
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