By Markus Werner
Translated by Michael Hoffman
Paperback: 9781628976922
eBook: 9781628976939
Publication Date: April 13th, 2027
Description
Konrad Zündel is a man at the end of his rope in Markus Werner’s cult-hit first novel.
Zündel’s Exit is a dark comedy of psychological disintegration, scrounged from notebooks and hearsay. These fragments tell the story of Konrad Zündel: schoolteacher, philosopher, wanna-be writer—scattered, self-conscious, anxious, unlucky, discontent. One summer, he decides to flee his workaday life at all costs, only to find escape always a little beyond his reach. He makes it as far as Italy when he sees a child vomit in a department store, loses his front-tooth on a ferry, then finds a severed finger in a restroom before retreating to his home in Switzerland. Zündel himself seems on the verge of falling to bits, as his marriage, career, thoughts, and words collapse around him. Will there be anything left, or anyone to hold the pieces?
Reviews
“Markus Werner finds company among an elect and heroic group of voluptuaries, but of a special kind; like Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, or Beckett’s Murphy, or the high-pitched monodrama of the impasse we get in Buster Keaton, Zündel’s Exit gorges on the limit point of madness, of fidgeting hands and heads and hearts punished by the sclerosis of cramped conditions.” —The Nation
“For such a short, quick-moving novel, it is remarkably full: action, hearsay, philosophizing, diary entries, imagined dialogue, advice. The speed and force and assurance with which the novel moves is arresting: it convinces us of the drama in the drama, and the drama in the everyday.” —The Rumpus
“Humor is a driving force of Zündel’s Exit, with most of it coming from the narrator’s layer of caring distance and the creative, lively voice that Werner gives him. This liveliness, plus his understanding of Zündel’s knowingly petty attempts to fight against the world, leads to moments that capture the heart of the novel” —Full Stop
Biographical Note
Markus Werner was a German-speaking Swiss author. He was the author of seven novels, including Zündels Abgang (Zündel’s Exit), Am Hang (On the Edge), and Die kalte Schulter (Cold Shoulder). Born in 1944 in Eschlikon, in northeast Switzerland, he entered the University of Zürich in 1965, where he studied German, philosophy and psychology. In 1974, Werner completed a doctorate on Max Frisch, whose writing was to be an important influence upon Werner’s own. Werner then began work as a teacher and an assistant professor at a high school in Schaffhausen, but eventually dedicated himself exclusively to writing, and lived and wrote in Schaffhausen for the remainder of his life. He has received numerous German-language awards, including the Hermann-Hesse-Literaturpreis, the Joseph Breitbach Prize, the Bodensee Literature Prize, and others.
Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet and critic and the translator of many German books. He taught for a number of years at the University of Florida.