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[ excerpt ]
German writing
Listen to Pessl's
Reinventing Tibet
author events:
about the translator:
Mark Kanak's work and translations have appeared in journals throughout the world, and a collection of
poetry in German, absturze, was recently published by Frohliche Wohnzimmer Verlag in Vienna.
He has also translated into German Jeff Tweedy's adult head (kopf erwachesen). Kanak is
the recipient of the 2006 Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry.
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aquamarine
Final Tales of the Revolution
by Peter Pessl
translated from the German by Mark Kanak
Aquamarine is the result of two years' musings following the author's long and twisted journey
(both in terms of pathways and encounters) to Mexico in 1993. After having been variously reworked,
the volume was eventually published in German in 1998. Considered groundbreaking in form and style,
the novel is composed of seven intertwining tales whose unsettling, exceptionally ambivalent female
protagonists, "Aquamarine" and "Marine," crisscross diverse Mexican landscapes and cities of both
external and internal geographies much like a madcap road movie plowing straight through historical
episodes into present-day reality. Along the way we encounter the horrific tragedies of private
and political worlds as the tales channel into a common stream of storytelling that is so immediate
in its presentation it violently impacts the very language itself (and the immanent possibilities or
impossibilities in the author's use of language). The reader is thus swept into a swirling dreamscape
of words and images, a ramshackle narrative construct where every kind of reality that is, always
was, and will continue to be exist simultaneously.
Aquamarine explores the unfolding of ideas using a palette
of blues, yellows, beiges, or "leg-color," ideas coiled like a garden hose with all its kinks, awkward
convolutions, and ungainly twists, each loop having its own radius but belonging to the
same — is the same — loop. Revolution in every sense.
Praise:
Peter Pessl's art is dreamy. A chaos of individual fragments are brought together so sharply
and meticulously that the flickering before the reader's eyes unexpectedly takes shape as an
elegiac underpainting. Pessl's technique could be called literary cubism. |
— Basler Zeitung
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If you've ever dropped acid in the desert with a cabal of mad poets,
Pessl's wacky trip through Mexico may feel familiar. |
— Publishers Weekly
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ISBN 978 80 86264 28 8
155 pp.
141 x 205mm
softcover with flaps
fiction: novel
published 2008
Price of €12.50 includes airmail worldwide
or order from:
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Powells
SPD
Central Books
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