In this entertaining satire of empire, Christian Kracht makes use of a nihilistic magic realism, without the sweetness one normally associates with that mode.
German literature
Book Review: The Absurdity of Living in the Space Between — “Elsewhere” by Doron Rabinovici
Elsewhere is a tragicomic work, its plethora of absurd coincidences an attempt to portray the senseless plight of the post-postmodern man.
Book Review: “Natura Morta” — A Powerful Still Life in Prose
The omniscient narrator in Natura Morta is flawlessly neutral, allowing the images, the minimal action, and the character’s reactions to the events of this single day in a Roman square tell the story.
Film Commentary: Wes Anderson, Stefan Zweig, and Discovering the Value of “The World of Yesterday”
Perhaps a movie such as “The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is much more than a zany comedy, can lead us back, as director Wes Anderson may have intended, to the fabulous writing of Stefan Zweig.
Book Review: Roving Free Agents of the Imagination
Autobiography, personal essay, history, current affairs, or literary criticism, many are the guises under which travel writing has seduced readers of decidedly categorical bent.
Book Feature: Authors Bernhard Schlink and Joyce Hackett on the Craft of Writing and Writing About the Past
Sponsored by the Harvard Writing Program and the Harvard Summer School, the event was introduced, perhaps humorously, to the audience as a “meeting of German–American relations.” In reality, it was a more of a showcase in differences about each country’s historical imagination.
Book Review: The “Three Lives” of Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig’s was a dramatic, action-packed, intense epic of a life, but Oliver Matuschek’s biography, Three Lives, simply plods along.