Klausen

An exceptionally gifted talent. -Sachsische Zeitung

Nobody knows exactly what happened in the small town of Klausen, or rather, everyone knows: a bomb went off on the autobahn, or at a shack near the autobahn, or someone was shooting at the town from a bridge; it all stems from a fight over measuring noise pollution on the town square, or it was the work of eco-terrorists, orItalians. And while nobody knows who or what to blame-although they’re certainly uneasy about the Moroccan and Albanian immigrants who are squatting in an abandoned castle-they all suspect that Josef Gasser, who spent several years away from Klausen, in Berlin, is behind it all. Only one thing is clear: Klausen was now a crime scene.

In

Klausen

, Andreas Maier has taken Thomas Bernhard’s method-the nested indirect speech, the repetition, the endless paragraph-and pointed it at an entire town. A town where one confusion leads to the next, where everyone is living in a fog of rumor, but where everyone claims to know exactly what’s going on, even if they’ve changed their story several times.

Andreas Maier was born in Bad Nauheim outside Frankfurt in 1967. In addition to winning the Ernst Willner Prize at the Ingeborg Bachmann Literary Competition in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 2000, he received the Jurgen Ponto Foundation’s Literary Support Prize and the Aspekte Literary Prize for his first novel Waldchestag.

Kenneth J. Northcott is a professor emeritus of German at the University of Chicago. He has translated many books, among them Thomas Bernhard’s The Voice Imitator, Histrionics, and Three Novellas.