Search results for ""Author Jean M Snook""

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.

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A critical and commercial success in German, Kahn & Engelmann tells the story of a Jewish family from rural Hungary, their immigration to Vienna in the great days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, their loves, business ventures and failings, and their eventual tragic destruction. Narrated by Peter Engelmann, who wishes only to forget his past, this highly original novel recreates a vanished Vienna with salty humour and humanity. In a voice which is appealing without being sentimental, Peter describes his escape from the Nazis through snowy woods, his attempts to start a new life in England and Canada, and his decision to immigrate to Israel. Written by an eminent scholar, himself a survivor of Nazism, Kahn & Engelmann is both an entertaining novel and a major work of Holocaust literature.

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A riot of confession, complaint, and sensual detail, this novel charts the first year alone of a man who has abandoned his wife, life, family, and homeland, seeking an impossible ideal: freedom.

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One of the loveliest riddles of Austrian literature is finally available in English translation: Gert Jonke’s 1982 novel, Awakening to the Great Sleep War, is an expedition through a world in constant nervous motion, where reality is rapidly fraying—flags refuse to stick to their poles, lids sidle off of their pots, tram tracks shake their stops away like fleas, and books abandon libraries in droves. Our cicerone on this journey through the possible (and impossible) is an “acoustical decorator” by the name of Burgmüller—a poetical gentleman, the lover of three women, able to communicate with birds, and at least as philosophically minded as his author: “Everything has suddenly become so transparent that one can’t see through anything anymore.” This enormously comic—and equally melancholic—tale is perhaps Jonke’s masterwork.

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