"Kluge's frequent interrogatory dialogues on all these episodes throw up an array of talking-points that make his work ideal for an avant-garde reading group or post-graduate seminar, though less so for the solitary reader."
In a work that intentionally defies categorization, the elderly German polymath Kluge, a film director as well as writer, offers commentary on love, war, the Devil and the cosmos, from the stars to the oceans, using myth, fables, the historical record and invented dialogues.
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"A small gem: still brilliantly alive and relevant."
Intimate reflections from one of postwar Germany's most admired novelists (Winterspelt, 1978, etc.) on life under Hitler and, in the act of deserting an army at war, his own profound emancipation.
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Romanian-born Müller (The Land of Green Plums, 1996, etc.) now lives in Berlin, having successfully fled after running afoul of the Ceausescu regime. Here, she offers a grim portrait of totalitarian life's squalor and pain.
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"For all its mystery and profundity, there's also much self-absorption in this traveler's tale, and its tone must be overcome occasionally to appreciate where the story is going."
The predecessor to Sebald's two acclaimed novels of history, memory, and melancholy—The Rings of Saturn (1998) and The Emigrants (1996)—is a lesser, more autobiographical work, yet it moves in elegant, unanticipated ways across time, the landscapes of Europe, and into the depths of human experience.
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