The Shadow of the Coachman's Body

by Peter Weiss, Rosmarie Waldrop (Translator)

Overview

A meticulously observed and macabre tale of hell on earth from the revolutionary German author of the famous play Marat/Sade

Peter Weiss’s first prose work, The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body, was unanimously praised as an original and perfect work of art by critics when it appeared in 1960. Here, in poet Rosmarie Waldrop’s stunning translation, Weiss arranges a dark, vividly alive comedy of inert objects in a dismal boarding house—stones, buttons, hooks, needles, chairs, newspapers in an outhouse, clinking tin cups, celestial orbs, sewing machines, an overwound windup music box—which have oblique characters’ shadows as their supporting cast. Described by Weiss as a “micro-novel,” The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body can be obscene, trivial and brutal, and yet it is also peculiarly intimate and offers endless possibilities—like a telescope and kaleidoscope rolled into one.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811231619
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	297,568
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 4.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Peter Weiss (1916–1982) was a German playwright, dramatist, visual artist, filmmaker, and novelist. His works include The Aesthetics of Resistance and The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body. He is best known in the US for his play Marat/Sade: Peter Brook’s production received the Tony Award for Best Play in 1966. His documentary drama The Investigation, which recreates the trial of Auschwitz concentration camp guards, was produced on American television in the 1960s. He was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize after his death in 1982.

Rosmarie Waldrop, born in Germany in 1935, is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and essays, and a noted translator of French and German poetry. Her most recent books are The Nick of Time, Gap Gardening: Selected Poems (winner of the Los Angeles Book Prize), and Driven to Abstraction. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts of Letters, and is a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. For fifty-six years, she and her husband Keith Waldrop ran one of the country’s most vibrant experimental poetry presses, Burning Deck, in Providence, Rhode Island.

Editorial Reviews

02/28/2022

Weiss (The Aesthetics of Resistance) follows in this intensely visual story an unnamed narrator’s attempts at documenting all he sees at his boardinghouse over the course of several days. The narrator starts by observing his muddy, damp surroundings while using the outhouse. By his own account, his attempts to write are perennially stalled, comprised of “short, broken-off beginnings.” Nevertheless, he keeps at it. At dinner, he details the looks of the housekeeper and other boarders, and how they fill their plates, use their utensils, and cant their arms. Later, he watches through a keyhole as a father beats his son. An evening party in the housekeeper’s room turns farcical, with furniture getting broken and people being locked in a closet. When his observations grow too dull to produce any writing, he retreats to his attic room, where he puts salt in his eyes to induce visions. Weiss’s lifelike descriptions, for example as the narrator imagines shapes and colors morphing into the shape of a woman, are complemented with surreal illustrations by the author. This captivating exercise rises above its mundane and grotesque material. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Staggering ambition! Extraordinary richness."

Susan Sontag

"Exhilaratingly strange, compelling, and original."

Bookforum

"Peter Weiss has, of course, achieved international celebrity through his plays and dramatic documentaries. But in the long run it may well be that his earlier prose writings will be recognized as his finest work."

George Steiner