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The Weight of Things
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A strange slow-burning domestic nightmare, tinged with the traumas of war.
The first of the late Marianne Fritz’s works to be translated into English. This dark gem of a novel swerves from uneasy pantomime comedy to sheer domestic horror. Fritz has a clammy handle on all that makes humans miserable: roll up for the horrors of jealousy, war, confinement, mental illness, regret and unhappy motherhood.
The Weight of Things is the first book, and the first translated book by Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948–2007). After winning acclaim with this novel—awarded the Robert Walser Prize in 1978—she embarked on a brilliant and ambitious literary project called “The Fortress,” which earned her cult status, comparisons to James Joyce, 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.
Reviews
Written in a brisk tone that disguises its destination, this slow-burning horror story steps quietly and methodically into a heart of familial darkness... The war haunts this novel, adding to the weight of everyday things and everyday evils that Fritz so ingeniously dissects.
Fritz won the Kafka Prize in 2001 and her work, like his, is both deeply upsetting and profound. Her translator writes in his ‘Afterword’ that ‘there is a class of artists whose work is so strange and extraordinary that it eschews all gradations of the good and the mediocre: genius and madness are the only descriptors adequate to its scale,’ and he situates Fritz quite forcefully in this class. He seems to be correct.
A harrowing book about the horrors of motherhood, jealousy, and war trauma.
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Fritz’s poetic auscultation of this weight, this madness, is absolutely astounding, both in its scope and its subtlety. It is difficult to summarize her methods, as they are woven so seamlessly into the narrative: its pacing, its movement through time, coalescing into a sensory experience. She describes a palpable environment of disorientation and loss, set against a tapestry of gray skies, war-ruined structures, and dark woods into which people disappear.
Entropy -
Not an easy read, but surely an important one.
Publishers Weekly -
The Weight of Things is a tightly wrought masterwork of narrative, a little gem that shows off everything that it can (and should) do, without looking as if it were particularly trying.
Los Angeles Review of Books -
A thirty-year-old woman from a working-class background who had turned to literature after completing vocational training in secretarial work, Fritz came seemingly out of nowhere to astonish the literary world with her merciless, spare and tightly wrought chronicle of domestic horror that displayed an apparently effortless balance of wit and philosophy.
Times Literary Supplement