447 pages
6 x 9 in

i sat down and read the first story in this collection so i can actually write about it now. it's one of the funniest things i've read in a minute. bitter curmudgeon day-drinks and scowls at desert, peers, culture, humanity, life. the idiosyncratic punctuation rapidly fades away to intuition, but i'd probably particularly recommend this to those fond of the more maximalist end of literary modernism...

translated by john e woods, who is the human being that translated all of arno schmidt, the majority of which was put out on dalkey archive. including the awe-inspiring Zettel's Traum/Bottom's Dream which is 1500 LARGE (>A4) pages of some old pervert talking about Poe and trying to seduce some guy's daughter at the same time. this is what books were invented for.

anyway, yeah, dense, cryptic, absurd, apparently obscene (the novella "Lake Scenery With Pocahontas" got him in trouble for reasons i'm not entirely clear on). the sort of thing that probably either draws you in like a magnet or doesn't appeal to you at all. no offense taken.

one of the pages in the scan was somehow dog-eared, and then flattened like an insect into the final print. i am unable to do anything about this without a clean scan of that page. and i think it's fun. it reminds you of the illegitimacy of everything which is going on here. which is important.