A legendary literary figure who initiated a one-man Beat Generation in his native Germany, Wolf Wondratschek "is eccentric, monomaniacal, romantic--his texts are imbued with a wonderful, reckless nonchalance" ( Patrick Süskind).
To let Wondratschek\'s voice be drowned in the babble of today\'s literature would be a colossal mistake." --Patrick Süskind, internationally bestselling author of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. "A romantic in a madhouse.
Sebald, Hans Keilson, and Thomas Bernhard, Wolf Wondratschek \'s Self-Portrait with Russian Piano is a literary sonata circling the eternal question of whether beauty, music, and passion are worth the sacrifices some people are compelled to make for them.
G.
Rhapsodic and melancholic, with shades of Vladimir Nabokov, W.
Over a series of coffee dates, punctuated by confessions, anecdotes, and rages--and by the narrator\'s schemes to keep his quarry talking--a strained friendship develops between the two men, and it soon becomes difficult to tell who is more dependent on the other.
This eccentric gentleman--sometimes charming, sometimes sulky, sometimes disconcertingly frank--knows the end of his life is approaching, and allows himself to be convinced to tell his life story.
A Soviet pianist of international renown, Suvorin committed career suicide when he developed a violent distaste for the sound of applause.
In one of these cafés, our anonymous narrator meets a strange character, "like someone out of a novel" a decrepit old Russian named Suvorin.
The past lives on in the cafés where lost souls come to kill time and hash over the bygone glories of the twentieth century--or maybe just a recent love affair.
Vienna is an uncanny, magical, and sometimes brutally alienating city.
Now, he tells a story of a man looking back on his life in an honest portrait of the artist as an old man.
A legendary literary figure who initiated a one-man Beat Generation in his native Germany, Wolf Wondratschek "is eccentric, monomaniacal, romantic--his texts are imbued with a wonderful, reckless nonchalance" ( Patrick Süskind)
