ON A DARK NIGHT I LEFT MY SILENT HOUSE

In the Austrian postmodernist’s latest metafiction (My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, 1998, etc.), an unnamed narrator retells a story told to him by a disoriented pharmacist: of marital and familial estrangement, a journey to a remote Alpine location accompanied by a poet and a former champion skier (who may be avatars of the pharmacist’s own conflicting traits and impulses), and the reappearances (in strange guises) of seemingly lost loved ones. Another quirky, borderline-obscure demonstration of how “the awareness of experiencing a story . . . create[s] a sense of distance” from the self one knows, and, against all odds, a haunting fictional realization of alienation, despair, and the paradoxical recuperative power of seeing things and preserving them through the agency of language.