The Extended View

Why are funny books funny? What do unsuccessful writers fail? Büchner Prize winner Wilhelm Genazino finds unexpected answers to these and other questions.

DER GEDEHNTE BLICK is a book about observation and reading, about life stories and literary adventures, about photographs and the power of laughter. "Laughing philosophers are rare", Genazino writes in a sparkling introduction to Theodor W. Adorno's sense of humour. Notes on Italo Svevo lead to a brief survey of literary failures, and a photograph of two children with a doll turns into a reflection on perception and portraiture.

"The heaviest things are lifted here with the lightest of sentences", Andrea Köhler wrote in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung about "the small miracles of perception" in Wilhelm Genazino's novels. And these qualities, loved by many readers, can be found in his essays and articles, too: the power of observation, the puns, the precision of language, the ability to distil from seemingly banal everyday objects and situations the astonishing, the unfamiliar, the never-before-seen. DER GEDEHNTE BLICK is a new "miracle of perception" by Wilhelm Genazino.