Wacholder lives and works at Custom House No. 8 with his adopted son Aslan and a lodger named Leo. Aslan spends his days copying out the novels of Kleist, Schiller, Goether, and Mann; Leo, never leaving his bed, mentally composes his philosophical masterwork, Placental Theory of Existence; and Wacholder's only apparent responsibility is keeping watch over a towering mountain of paper. Wacholder's consuming passion, however, is his only true friend and nemesis, Würz.
Würz hasn't left his home in over seventeen years. He lives there, in a cocoon of cleanliness and order, with his wife Rita and Rita's two grown sons, Arnold and Arnulf. Würz has dedicated his life to perfecting his home and eliminating every last atom of dirt. His happiness is disturbed only by the letters, 74 in all, Wacholder has sent him over the years. These letters—dictated by Wacholder, written by Aslan, and full of every kind of insanity and invective—are intended to smoke Würz out of his hole, both for his own good and to stop him from plotting against Wacholder.
When the 74th letter seemingly has no effect, Wacholder turns to other increasingly outlandish schemes to defeat his rival, even staging a rally to declare Würz's non-existence. A feverishly comic carnival, Ergo is Jakov Lind's most experimental work and the final novel he wrote in German.
Würz hasn't left his home in over seventeen years. He lives there, in a cocoon of cleanliness and order, with his wife Rita and Rita's two grown sons, Arnold and Arnulf. Würz has dedicated his life to perfecting his home and eliminating every last atom of dirt. His happiness is disturbed only by the letters, 74 in all, Wacholder has sent him over the years. These letters—dictated by Wacholder, written by Aslan, and full of every kind of insanity and invective—are intended to smoke Würz out of his hole, both for his own good and to stop him from plotting against Wacholder.
When the 74th letter seemingly has no effect, Wacholder turns to other increasingly outlandish schemes to defeat his rival, even staging a rally to declare Würz's non-existence. A feverishly comic carnival, Ergo is Jakov Lind's most experimental work and the final novel he wrote in German.
Ralph Manheim was one of the great translators of the 20th Century. He translated the works of Günter Grass, Bertolt Brecht, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Hermann Hesse, Peter Handke, Novalis, and Martin Heidegger, among many others. In 1982, PEN American Center created an award—the Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation—in his name, which honors a translator whose career has demonstrated a commitment to excellence through the body of his or her work.
January 2010
Novel
Paperback, 150 pages
$13.95 $11.15
5.5" x 8.5"
978-1-934824-17-7
1-934824-17-8
Novel
Paperback, 150 pages
5.5" x 8.5"
978-1-934824-17-7
1-934824-17-8
"Jakov Lind has a splendid theatrical talent, sardonic and Pinteresque, gruff and Brechtian, with some old master, some Gogol, as his Ariadne. . . . Intricate, black, bestial."
—New York Review of Books
"Lind is a writer—one of the best—who has chosen to speak in a different tongue. It is amazing that he is witty; it is not at all surprising that he is profound."
—New York Times
"You emerge from a Lind story as you would from a nightmare."
—Sasha Weiss, Nextbook
Sergeant Gauthier Bachmann is the perfect Nazi soldier. But after a horrifying defeat at Voroshenko, where most of his Eighth Hessian Infantry Regiment was slaughtered in a single instant, Bachmann was declared mentally unfit to serve. Incapable of accepting this judgment, and of returning to his girlfriend and a quiet life as a gold- and silversmith, Bachmann wanders the war-ravaged countryside, trying to find a way to rejoin his regiment, or any regiment, and return to the front.
While trying to find his regiment and come to terms with the horrors he has seen and committed, the increasingly unstable Bachmann is manipulated by a series of figures from the underbelly of war’s underbelly—deserters and collaborators, corrupt officers and sexual predators—who induce him to carry out their venal missions, which they’ve justified against the background of institutionalized murder going on all around them.
Containing dark echoes of Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk, Jakov Lind's Landscape in Concrete is an "astonishing and highly original imagining of (the) dimensions of evil including sadistic cruelty, of the condition of being a victim and the madness abroad which constitutes the virtual victory of Hitler if we fail to translate survival into freedom" (Anthony Rudolf).
While trying to find his regiment and come to terms with the horrors he has seen and committed, the increasingly unstable Bachmann is manipulated by a series of figures from the underbelly of war’s underbelly—deserters and collaborators, corrupt officers and sexual predators—who induce him to carry out their venal missions, which they’ve justified against the background of institutionalized murder going on all around them.
Containing dark echoes of Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk, Jakov Lind's Landscape in Concrete is an "astonishing and highly original imagining of (the) dimensions of evil including sadistic cruelty, of the condition of being a victim and the madness abroad which constitutes the virtual victory of Hitler if we fail to translate survival into freedom" (Anthony Rudolf).
Ralph Manheim was one of the great translators of the 20th Century. He translated the works of Günter Grass, Bertolt Brecht, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Hermann Hesse, Peter Handke, Novalis, and Martin Heidegger, among many others. In 1982, PEN American Center created an award—the Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation—in his name, which honors a translator whose career has demonstrated a commitment to excellence through the body of his or her work.
March 2009
Novel
Paperback, 190 pages
$13.95 $11.15
5.5" x 8.5"
978-1-934824-14-6
1-934824-14-3
Novel
Paperback, 190 pages
5.5" x 8.5"
978-1-934824-14-6
1-934824-14-3
"It is this book that confirms Lind's status as an author of international importance."
—New York Times
"One of the most idiosyncratic writers of the twentieth century."
—Independent (UK)
"Jakov was a bad boy. . . . He was a coyote, a trickster. He enjoyed hash and LSD. A wicked smile played around his mouth, while witty aphorisms and deep insights tripped off his lips. He emanated inner strength—and an electric intelligence that we all wanted to emulate."
—Anthony Rudolf
"Landscape in Concrete is essentially a terrifying attempt to test possible clues which will guide man through the contemporary maze."
—Critique