Description
Book SynopsisWolfgang Koeppen is the most important German novelist of the past seventy years: a radical, not to say terrifying, stylist; a caustic, jet-black comedian; a bitter prophet. His late, autobiographical work--the short, intense autofiction, Youth, translated here for the first time--is a portrait of the little north German town of Greifswald before World War I, and is a miracle of compression: this is not historical fiction, but a kind of personal apocalypse. Also included here, in Michael Hofmann's brilliant translation, is one of Koeppen's very last works: a short, fragmentary text spoken over a 1990 German television program depicting his return visit to the town of his schooldays.
Trade ReviewIt is hard to think of a German writer of his generation who has written more sensitively or more profoundly about the Holocaust and its effects than Wolfgang Koeppen. -- Ruth Franklin, New Republic This dazzlingly oblique late work explains and elaborates one man's personal odyssey and also that of a society inching towards atrocity. -- Eileen Battersby The Irish Times The whorl of [Wolfgang] Koeppen's fragments is always steeled by his precision and capacity for revelation, and each word in [Michael] Hofmann's translation feels fixed in place as though it were a mortared brick. This final work from this German master is a brackish jewel. -- Scott Esposito Times Literary Supplement
