Vienna English Book Club

The Weight of Things is the first book, and the first translated book, and possibly the only translatable book by Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948–2007). For after winning acclaim with this novel—awarded the Robert Walser Prize in 1978—she embarked on a 10,000-page literary project called “The Fortress,” creating over her lifetime elaborate colorful diagrams and typescripts so complicated that her publisher had to print them straight from her original documents. A project as brilliant as it is ambitious and as bizarre as it is brilliant, it earned her cult status, comparisons to James Joyce no less than Henry Darger, and admirers including Elfriede Jelinek and W. G. Sebald.

Yet in this, her first novel, we discover not an eccentric fluke of literary nature but rather a brilliant and masterful satirist, philosophically minded yet raging with anger and wit, who under the guise of a domestic horror story manages to expose the hypocrisy and deep abiding cruelties running parallel, over time, through the society and the individual minds of a century.

source: goodreads

"The truth has no ornaments."
Fleur Jaeggy’s SS Proleterka is a minimalist narrative that explores the complexities of family alienation and memory. The story follows a fifteen-year-old girl during a cruise to Greece aboard a Yugoslavian ship with her distant father, Johannes. The voyage serves as a period of profound transition and observation as the narrator navigates her environment and a deep sense of detachment.

Through sharp and precise prose, Jaeggy reveals the fractured history of a family defined by absence. A central theme of the novel is the exploration of emotional detachment and the narrator's attempt to define herself outside of her family's shadow. The narrative moves between the physical confines of the ship and the narrator's later reflections, offering a brief but intense examination of the relationships between family members and the enduring impact of shared history.