Description: brütt, or The Sighing Gardens is the hallucinatory tale of an obsessive writer's love affair late in life as told through the daily journal entries of the writer--a montage of relentless observation interspersed with found materials from newspaper articles, literature, and private correspondence. The process of aging and the process of writing are two persistent and carefully intertwined themes, though it is apparent that plot and theme are subordinate to the linguistic experiments that Friederike Mayrocker performs as she explores them.
Review Quotes: "Friederike Mayrocker enjoys a growing reputation as a writer whose art insistently crosses the boundaries between literary forms. Her prose is lyrical, and draws on the work of a wide range of modernist writers, from Gertrude Stein to Virginia Woolf. Beckett and Thomas Bernhard have also influenced her style of bombarding the reader with a mixture of realistic and fantastic images. The device forces the reader to participate in the mental drama which supplants narrative in her work. [A]n ambitious project, often lyrical and intense, and altogether a tour de force." --Times Literary Supplement