Лучшие книги Уолтера Абиша

Уолтер Абиш - один из наиболее оригинальных и известных экспериментальных писателей США. За свой второй роман "Сколь это по-немецки" (1980) получил Фолкнеровскую премию. Характерное для Абиша рафинированное, экономное пользование языком, формальные эксперименты, опускающиеся до уровня алфавита, четко вырисовываются в сборнике рассказов "В совершенном будущем" (1975). Все произведения публикуются в России впервые.

In Abish’s first collection, Minds Meet, the story “How the Comb Gives a Fresh Meaning to the Hair” conceives of Marcel Proust living in Albuquerque, where retarded children, cabbies, Pueblo Indians, and a young couple called Mr. and Mrs. Dip flit through short paragraphs bearing titles like “Fingernails” and “Marcel’s Childhood.”

Alphabetical Africa, Walter Abish’s delightful first novel, is an extraordinary linguistic tour de force, high comedy set in an imaginary dark continent that expands and contracts with ineluctable precision, as one by one the author adds the letters of the alphabet to his book, and then subtracts them. While the “geoglyphic” African landscape forms and crumbles, it is, among other things, attacked by an army of driver ants, invaded by Zanzibar, painted orange by the transvestite Queen Quat of Tanzania, and becomes a hunting ground for a pair of murderous jewel thieves tracking down their nymphomaniac moll.

In the Future Perfect is Walter Abish’s third collection of fiction. Readers of his earlier prose works––Minds Meet and the novel Alphabetical Africa––will recognize the dead-pan humor that subverts familiar realities by reflecting on the nature of language itself rather than plot or narrative voice and line. With this ironic introduction of the unexpected, society’s most comfortable symbols––the icon of the model city, for example, or the sanctuary of the perfect home––come to delineate the very precariousness of our existence. In one of the nine stories included here, an American on his first trip abroad interviews a postwar German writer in a new town built on the site of a former concentration camp. In another, a successful woman executive, between elegant parties, swings with leather-jacketed motorcycle thugs in her impeccable Central Park West apartment. One of the leading lights in experimental letters in America, Walter Abish writes fiction that reflects on its own structure and confronts its characters with the preposterousness of their condition. “Is there any other way to live?” was the question reiterated in Minds Meet. To which the answer remains: “There is not, but we try.”

The question HOW GERMAN IS IT underlies the conduct and actions of the characters in Walter Abish's new novel, an icy panorama of contemporary Germany, in which the tradition of order and obedience, the patrimony of the saber and the castle on the Rhine, give way to the present, indiscriminate fascination with all things American. On his return from Paris to his home city of Wurtenburg, Ulrich Hargenau, whose father was executed for his involvement in the 1944 plot against Hitler, is compelled to ask himself, "How German am I?"--as he compares his own recent attempt to save his life, and his wife Paula's, by testifying against fellow members of a terrorist group, with his father's selfless heroism.