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Wilhelm Genazino
A Part Time Life
Details about the book
Novel
- date of publication: 04.02.2009
- 160 Pages
- Hanser Verlag
- hardcover
- ISBN 978-3-446-23265-5
- Deutschland: 20,00 €
- Österreich: 20,60 €
- ePUB-Format
- E-Book ISBN 978-3-446-23371-3
- E-Book Deutschland: 10,99 €
A man is fairly happy with his life and his girlfriend, until she decides she wants to have a child. Whatever his half-hearted notion of life's plan had been, he is sure this new development doesn't fit into it at all. To what lengths will he go to escape?
On completing his doctorate on Heidegger, Gerhard Warlich sets about procuring a job delivering laundry. He starts working his way up, settling into a safe if hardly exciting existence. But then one day Traudel – his pleasant, down-to-earth, unassertive partner – casually suggests she wants to have a baby. The prospect of fatherhood throws Gerhard's part-time involvement with life off course. To make matters even worse, his incidental presence on the sidelines of an anarchic demonstration – during working hours – results in his losing his job. After a series of similarly calamitous events, Traudel reaches her wit's end and admits him to a psychiatric hospital. Perhaps this will prove to be the perfect place for him to live his part time existence?
Wilhelm Genazino recounts this tale of a melancholic hero and his far more cheerful girlfriend in a wonderfully laconic, downbeat fashion, subjecting his protagonist's despair of life and love to a brilliant, ironic analysis.
»But in books, no wind blows, be it a breeze or a gale, the strength of which is not determined by the author. And therefore, the prevailing atmosphere of tragedy is as precisely and deliberately modulated by Genazino as the comical, the absurd, the satirical, the absurd, the poignant and every other element that converges in these 150 masterfully crafted pages.« (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)
Foreign Sales
China (Horizon), France (Bourgois), Netherlands (Atlas), Taiwan (Yuan-Liou), Turkey (Ayrinti)