Markus Werner, a German-speaking Swiss writer, masterfully captures the absurdity and tragicomedy of everyday life through his protagonists who have withdrawn from society. With remarkable precision and dry humor, Werner unveils the subtle absurdities of existence that lead to their collapse. His work explores human deficiencies, the yearning for love, and the constant struggle between self-acceptance and condemnation of the world. Werner offers a unique perspective on how seemingly mundane obstacles become sources of existential unraveling.
Set against a backdrop of dark humor, the story follows a disgraced priest grappling with the haunting presence of his dead father, who disapproves of his life choices. This compelling narrative weaves themes of guilt, redemption, and familial conflict, making it a memorable exploration of personal struggle within the framework of Swiss literature.
Moritz Wenk is an averagely unsuccessful painter, and Judith Wenk, a dental hygienist, are a close and harmonius couple. During a week in a very hot summer, in perhaps Zurich, he's found work cutting out and painting shop-window dummies for a costume rental firm. There he meets a small cast of extras: a befriended couple, Kurt and Silvia, who are having difficulties, Wenk's mother, a successful painter colleague of his (Rotzel), a little erotic confrontation with a trainee in the store, and another with an ex-model of his (Maya). It's his birthday, he gets to be 38. Cold Shoulder is a chamber novel told with Werner's characteristic charm and spleen that will delight current Werner fans and attract new ones as well.
Scrounged from his notebooks and hearsay, this is the story of a schoolteacher named Konrad Zündel: a philosopher, a wanna-be writer; scattered, self-conscious, glum, anxious, unlucky, discontent . . . At the end of his rope, he decides to flee his workaday life at all costs, only to find escape always a little beyond his reach. Zündel’s Exit is a Chaplinesque comedy of disintegration, never knowing if it’s coming or going. Scrounged from his notebooks and hearsay, this is the story of a schoolteacher named Konrad Zündel: a philosopher, a wanna-be writer; scattered, self-conscious, glum, anxious, unlucky, discontent . . . At the end of his rope, he decides to flee his workaday life at all costs, only to find escape always a little beyond his reach. First his tooth falls out in the sight of other travelers, then he finds a severed finger in a restroom on a train. In fact, Zündel seems on the verge of falling to bits, as do his words, thoughts, wife, and world—will there be anything left, and anyone to hold the pieces? Zündel’s Exit is a Chaplinesque comedy of disintegration, never knowing if it’s coming or going.
When the cynical divorce lawyer Thomas Clarin finds himself at a table on the terrace of the Bellavista Hotel beside Thomas Loos, an eccentric, ageing philologist, they strike up an unlikely conversation. Soon Clarin's questions tease out stories from Loos' past, and as both men slowly reveal more of themselves.