Walter Abish

Ulrich Hargenau testifies against fellow members of a German terrorist group in order to save himself and his wife, Paula, and contemplates the nature of his German heritage.

How German is it

"Walter Abish has dovetailed his novel within a Procrustean scheme that has the terrifying and irrefutable logic of the alphabet. Alphabetical Africa is in the line of writers such as Raymond Roussel, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec and Harry Mathews, who have used constrictive forms to penetrate the space on the other side of poetry." -- John Ashbery

Alphabetical Africa

Among the multifaceted characters whose lives interlock are Alejandro, a once-prominent literary critic fallen into disfavor; his estranged wife, Mercedes, whom he suspects of openly conducting an affair with an American writer; Bonny, the writer's runaway daughter, who is made to witness a calamitous sequence of events that culminates in murder; Preston, an American industrialist, and his sexually frustrated wife, Rita; and the unscrupulous art dealer Pech. As the lives of these people press together, as they buckle and collapse, the novel holds up a mirror to a moment in which we lived--the end of a millennium, of an era-- and to the perils, temptations, and hysteria that lie just below the surface.

Eclipse Fever

I am the Dust under your feet

In the Future Perfect

Minds Meet

99, the New Meaning

Thomas Demand

Mark Godfrey

Nationalgalerie (Berlin)

Thomas Demands work lures the viewer into a reality that is not what it appears to be. His images present scenes of political and social events, which the artist recreates out of paper and cardboard, in a scale that is true to the original size of the setting. Demand then photographs these sculptures, creating images in which specific traces of the events and the protagonists are removed, leaving possible evidence of a crime scene, one which appears familiar but yet out of reach. The exhibition and book Nationalgalerie brings together Demands work of the last 15 years which is rooted in German imagery. Demand examines the Deutschlandbild, the German image in photographs from a variety of scenarios in the post-war period. From a selection both known and new of key images of decisive political events and private moments Demand offers a kaleidoscopic vision of a society.

Walter Abish

Books

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