Walaschek's Dream

Walaschek's Dream

Translated by Jamie Richards

Collection Swiss Literature Series

Giovanni Orelli's docufictional phantasmagoria revisits a lesser-known painting by Paul Klee titled Alphabet I, which features black letters and symbols scrawled over the sports page of a newspaper reporting the results of the 1938 Swiss National Cup. This play of coincidences sets the stage for Orelli's encyclopedic portrait of European culture under Nazism, where a motley crew of philosopher-peasants as well as historical luminaries like Arthur Schopenhauer, Vincent van Gogh, Viktor Shklovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Klee himself, and the titular footballer Eugene Walaschek all meet at the local tavern and debate the significance of Klee's work. Allusive, ironic, and elegiac, Joycean in scope, Walaschek's Dream is a singular meditation on the ephemerality of sport and the immortalizing power of art.

Details

Title Walaschek's Dream
Translated by Jamie Richards
Title First Published 15 May 2012
 
Format Hardcover
Nb of pages 160 p.
ISBN-10 1-56478-722-2
ISBN-13 978-1-56478-722-4
GTIN13 (EAN13) 9781564787224
Reference no. 1564787224
Nb of pages 160
List Price $21.95
 
Format Paperback
Nb of pages 160 p.
ISBN-10 1-56478-756-7
ISBN-13 978-1-56478-756-9
GTIN13 (EAN13) 9781564787569
Reference no. 1564787569
Nb of pages 160
List Price $13.95
 

Reviews

Press Reviews

Lire
"One of Switzerland's most important Italian-language authors . . . Walaschek’s Dream bears a complex and perplexing structure, taking as its point of departure the emotions born from contemplating a Klee painting at a museum in Bern . . ."

Isabelle Martin, Le Temps
"Transforming Switzerland into a playground . . . Walaschek's Dream uses a painting by Klee as the foundation of [a] game of life and death: the fates, separate and yet intertwined, of Servette soccer player Eugene Walaschek and the painter Paul Klee unraveling as a result of war . . . are the men doomed, asks the writer at the end of this staggeringly virtuosic narrative,
or can they hope to triumph by way of the work of the artist-creator?"

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Genres : Fiction
Countries : Switzerland


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