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Memoirs from a Madhouse (Hardcover)
Christine Lavant; Introduction by Annette Steinsiek, Ursula Schneider; Translated by Renate Latimer
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R549
R515
Discovery Miles 5 150
Save R34 (6%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Christine Lavant (1915-1973), one of Austria's most famous yet
obscure 20th century poets, wrote these memoirs during a voluntary
six-week stay in an asylum. Although written in 1946 the memoirs
were not published until 2001 because the poet felt that the work
was too personal. She records her failed suicide attempt, her
sleeplessness, her exhaustion, her eccentric and mad inmates, her
daily struggle to survive by writing. The author spent most of her
life in a small southern Austrian village, where she was born as
the ninth child in a family of miners. Pathologically introverted,
she was plagued by poverty and illness and supported herself with
knitting. Her poetry is unconventional, filled with neologisms,
mysterious and magical. We hear echoes of Rilke, whom she admired.
Thomas Bernhard referred to her work as testimony to a "zerstorte
Welt/destroyed world". She was honoured with numerous literary
awards, among them the Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1970,
three years before her death.
"On our 20th wedding anniversary my husband had invited me to an
elegant dinner. We sat in the casino-restaurant by candlelight and
had already ordered our meal. I had asked for filets of milk-fed
lamb, he a wiener schnitzel. He raised his glass and instead of
saying: "To our future happiness" he looked at me intently and
said: "I'm taking this opportunity today to tell you that I'm
planning to leave you. And so I'd like to drink with you to the
years still lying ahead of us, and which we'll be spending apart."
I felt that this could only be one of his bad jokes, and gave a
somewhat forced laugh..." A ghastly snippet in the life of
52-year-old Elfriede Schweiger-and an opportunity. The abandoned
wife and mother of a full-grown son studies law and opens her own
practice. The housewife is transformed into a career woman. But new
men enter her life, and with them come new problems. On the Phone
is the journal of a woman in upheaval and transition. Evelyn Grill
dissects the physical and spiritual sensitivities of this woman in
the prime of life, recounting moments of hope, disappointment,
love, self-doubt, and megalomania. Aloof, laconic, and full of
irony, Elfriede Schweiger's narrative causes a period of upheaval
in her life to pass like a parade before the reader's view.
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