Friedrich Durrenmatt: Selected Writings, Volume 3, Essays [Hardcover]

Friedrich Durrenmatt (Author), Kenneth J. Northcott (Editor), Joel Agee (Translator), Brian Evenson (Introduction)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226174328 | ISBN-13: 978-0226174327 | Publication Date: October 15, 2006 | Edition: 1

The Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90) was one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century. During the years of the cold war, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. Yet outside Europe, this prolific author is primarily known for only one work, The Visit. With these long-awaited translations of his plays, fictions, and essays, Dürrenmatt becomes available again in all his brilliance to the English-speaking world. 

Dürrenmatt’s essays, gathered in this third volume of Selected Writings, are among his most impressive achievements. Their range alone is astonishing: he wrote with authority and charm about art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theater. The selections here include Dürrenmatt’s best-known essays, such as “Theater Problems” and “Monster Essay on Justice and Law,” as well as the notes he took on a 1970 journey in America (in which he finds the United States “increasingly susceptible to every kind of fascism”). This third volume of Selected Writings also includes essays that shade into fiction, such as “The Winter War in Tibet,” a fantasy of a third world war waged in a vast subterranean labyrinth—a Plato’s Cave allegory rewritten for our own troubled times. 

Dürrenmatt has long been considered a great writer—but one unfairly neglected in the modern world of letters. With these elegantly conceived and expertly translated volumes, a new generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Friedrich Dürrenmatt was born in 1921 in the village of Konolfingen, near Berne, Switzerland, and was the son of a Protestant minister. During World War II he studied philosophy and literature at the Universities of Berne and Zurich. He wrote prolifically and traveled widely in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, taking particular interest in human rights and the preservation of Israel. Joel Agee has translated numerous German authors into English, including Heinrich von Kleist, Rainer Maria Rilke and Elias Canetti. He is also the author of two memoirs: Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany and In the House of My Fear. In 2005 he received the Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award for his translation of Hans Erich Nossack’s The End: Hamburg 1943 . Kenneth J. Northcott is professor emeritus of German at the University of Chicago. He has translated a number of books for the University of Chicago Press. Theodore Ziolkowski is the Class of 1900 Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is the author of many books, including The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises. Brian Evenson is the author of numerous works of fiction, including Altmann’s Tongue, Dark Property, Father of Lies, and The Wavering Knife. He is also director of the Literary Arts Program at Brown University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 184 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (October 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226174328
• ISBN-13: 978-0226174327
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,267,927 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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This review is from: Friedrich Durrenmatt: Selected Writings, Volume 3, Essays (Hardcover)

Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) is unanimously considered, together with Brecht, as the greatest writer of theatrical plays in Germany of the second post-war period. There is, however, an important difference that sets him apart from Brecht and this is despite the fact that Dürrenmatt did study and, in fact, ended up sharing many of Brecht's theories on epic theatre. This difference stems from the unforeseeability and unconventionality of Dürrenmatt's work that contributed, on a par with one of his countrymen, Max Frisch, to a radical renewal of dramaturgy written in Germany and which offered, in a somewhat grotesque way, a disturbing picture of the shabbiness hiding behind the appearance of respectability of the society in which he lived. Frisch, however, was obsessed with questions pertaining to identity, to rationalism, and to relationships between men and women. He was, so to speak, 'a sceptic humanist', an expression he particularly liked to use to define himself. Dürrenmatt, on the other hand, while characterised by his sarcastic exuberance that tends to overwhelm his interlocutor through fierce and pitiless taunting, has always a 'Christian foundation', as Frisch himself used to say, or, to be even more precise, a 'Calvinist foundation' because of its eagerness to look for answers to questions about grace and justice and to deliver from the top its judgement about human foolishness through the 'grotesque' that always seems to touch on the excessive but that is, at the same time, very distant from the measure of the other.