Synopses & Reviews
Friedrich Dürrenmatt was one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century, a talent on par with Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bertolt Brecht. A prolific writer of letters, poems, novels, and shorter fictions, his essays on literary forms as well as those on philosophy and politics provide a window onto his world and his work, demonstrating both his critical acumen and the breadth of his talents as a stylist.
Gathered from throughout his long career, the writings featured in Dürrenmatt’s Selected Essays are by turns playful and polemical, poetic and provocative, mordantly comical and deadly serious. Critics have often been perplexed by Dürrenmatt’s sudden shifts—from stage to prose and back, from comedy to tragedy and vice versa, from writing to drawing. In this volume, the full range of his interests in arts and letters—and their relationships to each other—becomes evident. In one section, a cluster of essays on the theater illuminate his idiosyncratic dramaturgical theories, drawing on examples from Attic comedy to Schiller, Brecht, and professional wrestling. In another, his philosophical essays intermingle his passionate reflections on ethical and political questions with his skeptical forays into metaphysics. And in autobiographical pieces such as the monumental “Vallon de l’Ermitage,” Dürrenmatt offers an intimate look at his “web of time”—the places where he traveled and the people with whom he lived and worked.
Suffused with melancholy, flashes of tenderness, and the author’s inimitable sense of the grotesque and absurd, these essays provide a compelling look at the author’s prodigious strength as a writer of nonfiction.
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“A tour-de-force . . . mesmerizing.”
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“Mystery readers should be grateful to the University of Chicago Press for bringing these gems back to life.”
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“[Dürrenmatt] doesnt so much alter the rules as sweep all the figures to the floor.”
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"Sui generis, a late-modernist legend that pushes past the usual conceptions of self and society and finds a whole new way of rendering disturbance."
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"His most ambitious book . . . dark and devious . . . almost obsessively drawn to mankind's most fiendish crimes."-Chicago Tribune (Chicago Tribune)
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“A parable of hell for an age consumed by images.”
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"His most ambitious book . . . dark and devious . . . almost obsessively drawn to mankind's most fiendish crimes."-Chicago Tribune
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“Reading Dürrenmatts work leaves us with the impression of having witnessed the creation and then the explosion of a small galaxy. The light continues to reach us long after closing his books.”
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“Reading Dürrenmatts work leaves us with the impression of having witnessed the creation and then the explosion of a small galaxy. The light continues to reach us long after closing his books.”Alberto Manguel, Spectator
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“A parable of hell for an age consumed by images.”New York Times Book Review
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“[Dürrenmatt] doesnt so much alter the rules as sweep all the figures to the floor.” Richard Lipez - Washington Post
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“His most ambitious book . . . dark and devious . . . almost obsessively drawn to mankinds most fiendish crimes.”
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"Intelligent, gripping fiction with sinister and uncomfortable implications."
Synopsis
In Friedrich Dürrenmatts experimental thriller
The Assignment, the wife of a psychiatrist has been raped and killed near a desert ruin in North Africa. Her husband hires a woman named F. to reconstruct the unsolved crime in a documentary film. F. is soon unwittingly thrust into a paranoid world of international espionage where everyone is watched—including the watchers. After discovering a recent photograph of the supposed murder victim happily reunited with her husband, F. becomes trapped in an apocalyptic landscape riddled with political intrigue, crimes of mistaken identity, and terrorism.
F.s labyrinthine quest for the truth is Dürrenmatts fictionalized warning against the dangers of a technologically advanced society that turns everyday life into one of constant scrutiny. Joel Agees elegant translation will introduce a fresh generation of English-speaking readers to one of European literatures masters of language, suspense, and dystopia.
“The narrative is accelerated from the start. . . . As the novella builds to its horripilating climax, we realize the extent to which all values have thereby been inverted. The Assignment is a parable of hell for an age consumed by images.”—New York Times Book Review
“His most ambitious book . . . dark and devious . . . almost obsessively drawn to mankinds most fiendish crimes.”—Chicago Tribune
“A tour-de-force . . . mesmerizing.”—Village Voice
About the Author
Friedrich Dürrenmatt was born in 1921 in the village of Konolfingen, near Berne, Switzerland. He wrote prolifically during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, taking particular interest in human rights and the preservation of Israel. He is the author of numerous books published by the University of Chicago Press, including
The Pledge.
Joel Agee has translated numerous German authors into English, including Heinrich von Kleist, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Elias Canetti. In 2005 he received the Modern Language Associations Lois Roth Award for his translation of Hans Erich Nossacks The End: Hamburg 1943.
Theodore Ziolkowski