Description:
Wolfgang Koeppen is the most important German novelist of the past seventy years: a radical, not to say terrifying, stylist; a caustic, jet-black comedian; a bitter prophet. His late, autobiographical work--the short, intense autofiction, Youth, translated here for the first time--is a portrait of the little north German town of Greifswald before World War I, and is a miracle of compression: this is not historical fiction, but a kind of personal apocalypse. Also included here, in Michael Hofmann's brilliant translation, is one of Koeppen's very last works: a short, fragmentary text spoken over a 1990 German television program depicting his return visit to the town of his schooldays.
Brief description: Wolfgang Koeppen's (1906-1996) The Hothouse was named one of the Los Angeles Times Best Books of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book.
Review Quotes:
This dazzlingly oblique late work explains and elaborates one man's personal odyssey and also that of a society inching towards atrocity.--Eileen Battersby"The Irish Times" (01/01/0001)