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 concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays, gathered in the first volume of Selected Writings, explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. In The Visit, for instance, an old lady who becomes the wealthiest person in the world returns to the village that cast her out as a young woman and offers riches to the town in exchange for the life of the man, now its mayor, who once disgraced her. Joel Agee’s crystalline translation gives a fresh lease to this play, as well as four others: The Physicists, Romulus the Great, Hercules and the Augean Stables, and The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi.
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.
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"[Dürrenmatt] was one of the giants of this, o (John Simon )
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.
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Duerrenmatt: King of the paradox.,
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This review is from: Friedrich Durrenmatt: Selected Writings, Volume I, Plays (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.
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