The Distant Sound

by Gert Jonke

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564785268
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	08/24/2010
Pages:	289
Sales rank:	1,143,549
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Gert Jonke is counted among Austria's most important authors and dramatists. Among other prizes, he received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, the Erich Fried Prize, and the Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature. He died in 2009 at the age of 62.

Jean M. Snook lives with her husband on the easternmost tip of North America, the Avalon Peninsula on the island of Newfoundland, where she has taught German language and literature at Memorial Universitysince 1984. She received the 2011 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator s Prize for her translation of Gert Jonke s The Distant Sound.

Editorial Reviews

In a dense existential journey that challenged the patience of his translator, late Austrian novelist Jonke (1946-2009) explores the disintegration of self. The unnamed narrator, a composer, wakes up one day in a psychiatric hospital room shared by a loudly wheezing patient and invaded by importunate staff. Mystified, our protagonist enlists the help of a hospital assistant he refers to as "SHE" or "HER" to seek out the doctor, who curtly reminds the patient (who has no memory) that he has attempted suicide and is being held until stabilized. Unfortunately, the patient's file has been lost or stolen (possibly by HER), and his investigation yields few clues. Determined to find the woman, the patient escapes from the hospital and embarks on ambling adventures with a group of traveling performers, only to return where he started. Perhaps too much was lost in translation, but given the solipsistic narrative's lack of cohesion and too willful strangeness, it doesn't seem like there was much there to begin with. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly