This important work of Austrian literature has first been published in 1974 and is on many school reading lists in Germany, Austria and Switzerland today. The English translation, however, seems to have seen only one edition before going out of print again – unlike its French and Spansh translations.

The story basically is the fictionalised account of the author's own horrible childhood on a mountain farm in the Alpine regions of Salzburg during the 1950s. In shocking detail he evokes his love-less, even cruel biological father, who took him into house and family much rather as a free farm hand than as his son. His has to work hard for his living and he is only allowed to go to school when it suits the father or the teacher starts pestering. Beatings and abuse are an almost daily occurence and weigh terribly on the sensitive as well as intelligent boy who as he grows older begins to consider suicide as an acceptable way out. But then he turns into a teenager. Seeing that is stronger than his father he forces open his way into a better life.

If you'd like to learn more about this sad and shattering book that is definitely worth reading, be invited to click here to read my long review on Edith's Miscellany.

This novel by the so far only Austrian Nobelist in Literature - Elfriede Jelinek - is from the 1970s, thus an early work of the author who is better known today as a playwright and a rather  controversial one that is.

Women as Lovers is a rather disillusioned story about two young women or actually girls called Brigitte and Paula who have grown up in miserable circumstances in Vienna and in a small village somewhere in the countryside respectively. They both believe that Mr. Right will be their ticket to happiness and so they do everything in their power to catch him. But then they find that reality isn't at all the way they expected.

For the full review please click here to go to my main book blog Edith’s Miscellany.

Women As Lovers - Elfriede Jelinek,Martin Chalmers 

A small Austrian town isn't a bed of roses, especially not when you have been born with a visible defect like the protagonist of this shattering short novel from the early 1990s.

In Winter Quarters the author depicts the fate of a woman in her early forties who is doubly handicapped: she was born with a limp and her surroundings crippled her emotionally. Lacking self-esteem and missing love she is easy prey for a brute of a man who wants a comfortable home and a servile woman who lets him do as he likes - domestic violence included. Her surroundings don't see or pretend not to see what is going on. But although she is weak on the outside, anger is boiling under the surface. Where will it lead?

Curious? Read the long review on my main book blog Edith's Miscellany!

In April 1915, well covered up by the turmoil of World War I raging all over Europe, the Ottoman rulers launched their big stroke against the hated Armenian population living in Eastern Anatolia. The Armenian genocide started in Van on 19 April 1915 and then swept over the rest of the region including the then Syrian coast. By the end of World War I, which also led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire five years later, estimated 500,000 to 1.5 million Armenians were dead. However, according even to the current Turkish government it was just a "relocation" with some inevitable casualties!

Based on a true story Franz Werfel's novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh gives early fictional (!) account of the resistance that the inhabitants of six Armenian villages offered the Ottoman authorities on the Musa Dagh – Mount Moses – at the Syrian coast during the summer of 1915... In the book as in reality almost all of them survived although Ottoman forces were by large superior in number because they were rescued by French and British warships virtually in the last minute.The Austrian author heard about the couragous as well as desperate fight during a travel in the Middle East where the misery of the refugees was still visible when he was there.

Much in the novel also recalls the Jewish holocaust although Adolf Hitler had only seized power in Germany when Franz Werfel's novel (which would soon be banned and burnt not just for its "dangerous" contents, but also because the author was Jewish) was first released in 1933.

Click here to know more about this classic of Austrian literature which I reviewed at length on my other book blog Edith's Miscellany.

Abridged version of my review posted on Edith’s Miscellany on 25 October 2013

The Austrian writer Erich Hackl is famed for his literary adaptations of true stories reminding of Latin-American testimonial literature. In 2002 he brought out The Wedding in Auschwitz which is based on a real event, too, namely the wedding of Margarita “Marga” Ferrer Rey and Rudolf “Rudi” Friemel at the registry of Auschwitz on 18 March 1944 at 11 a.m. It’s not the kind of book that Europeans like me are used to from childhood. Although it tells the true life story of the two protagonists from birth to death, it can’t even be called a biographical novel with full right. It’s much rather the testimony of a dozen of people who have in one way or another been linked to or part of the lives of the Austrian fighter against General Franco in the Spanish Civil War and the young Spanish antifascist who fell in love with him and had to flee from her country when Franco’s troupes marched into Barcelona.

In The Wedding in Auschwitz Erich Hackl worked up the material of his interviews in the same way as a film director might have done for a documentary. The language used is simple and matter-of-fact as suits the topic. The narrators are alternating all the time. Each one of the witnesses is allowed to tell her/his part of the story with her/his own voice and from her/his own point of view. Most of them remain nameless throughout the story of Marga and Rudi, but their identity uses to be revealed through what they say about their relations to the protagonists. This narrating technique necessarily makes it difficult to grasp at once who is currently speaking. Only in the author’s acknowledgements at the end of the book the narrators are given their names.

The Wedding in Auschwitz is a good read for everybody interested in life under the Nazi regime and in the concentration camps.

For the full review please click here to go to my blog Edith’s Miscellany.