Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer [Paperback]

Ernst Weiss (Author), Joel Rotenberg (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2010

“Ernst Weiss is in fact one of the few writers who may justly be compared to Franz Kafka...The book belongs to the very most interesting that I have come across in years. . . . One is filled with impressions, excited and gripped by striking existent but unforgettably cast images, characters, and events. By the way: it is all very Austrian.”—Thomas Mann

“I wonder why Weiss isn’t better known here. A doctor as well as a writer, he knew about the body as well as the heart, and you can trust him when he describes how each can act on the other.”—Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is a tragicomic and harrowing portrait of a morally defective mind. Written in a highly unreliable first person narrative, this unsung masterwork is an account of a crime and its aftermath: the scientist-hero (or scientist-villain) is tried, sentenced, and deported to a remote island where he is privileged to work as an epidemiologist. He seeks redemption in science, but in spite of himself he is a man of feeling. The book came out of the same fertile literary ground between the wars that produced The Man Without Qualities and The Sleepwalkers; like those modernist classics and the works of Ernst Weiss’ friend, Franz Kafka, Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is a prescient depiction of a profoundly unsettled society.

Ernst Weiss (1882–1940), born in Brunn, Austria (now Brno, Czech Republic), spoke and wrote in German. He was a trained physician and surgeon and served as a ship’s doctor for many years. He met Kafka in Berlin in 1913, and was convinced to write full-time. Weiss, a Jew, committed suicide in Paris when the Nazis entered the city in 1940.

Joel Rotenberg translated Chess Story and The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Vivid. . . . [With] the thrill of intellectual obsession. . . . Weiss's novels are remarkable for their ambitious conceits, stylistic variation, and unusual characters. . . . He uncovers the fear, apathy, longing and rage for which the now cliched psychoanalytic terms were invented. . . . His finest moments as a writer are when he plays the strict psychoanalyst, allowing his disturbed characters to speak their minds while he suspends judgment of right and wrong."
-The Nation

"Part medical detective story and part criminal confession. … the story addresses … justice, punishment, altruism, the fear of illness, the joy of recovery, the ecstasy of being alive, and the absolute worth of a single human life. … From a literary standpoint, readers can expect a sizeable reward."—Journal of the American Medical Association

"One of his strongest works. … One admires Weiss's skill at creating such a complex relationship between a subjective narrator who thinks he's objective and the reader who bears witness to it."—The Quarterly Conversation

"What an extraordinary writer he is!"—Franz Kafka

"Weiss … took soul-searching to its darkest depths. He is remarkably open searching and piercing."—The Complete Review

"What makes Georg Letham so fascinating is not that he is a murderer, but that he knows this and is still plagued with a compulsion to contribute to humanity … He kills for money, but when stripped of the need for money and forced to live, he becomes more of a human being."—Salonica

"A remarkable, haunting work. An extraordinary writer indeed. . . . Joel Rotenberg has done a fine job of rendering Weiss's snappily sardonic prose."—The Lancet Infectious Diseases

"I wonder why Weiss isn’t better known here. A doctor as well as a writer, he knew about the body as well as the heart, and you can trust him when he describes how each can act on the other."
—Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

"Ernst Weiss is in fact one of the few writers who may justly be compared to Franz Kafka . . . This is easily one of the most interesting books I have come across in years . . . One is filled with impressions, stimulated, gripped by images, characters, and episodes that are strangely real but also unforgettably fashioned. –And, incidentally, it's all very Austrian."
—Thomas Mann

About the Author

Like Kafka, a friend of his, Ernst Weiss was a German-speaking Jew from Prague. He was a physician as well as a novelist. Joel Rotenberg has translated Stefan Zweig's "Chess Story" and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's "The Lord Chandos Letter," both for the New York Review of Books series.

Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Archipelago Books; 1 Tra edition (March 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0980033039
• ISBN-13: 978-0980033038
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #836,868 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An addictive tale of a murderer--cynical, ironical and yet touchingly human., May 22, 2010

By 

Archipelago Books (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer (Paperback)

Dr. Georg Letham, a philosophical man of scientific training, has committed the ultimate offense. He has murdered his wife. What could drive an intelligent man to extinguish a human life, much less that of his spouse?

Praised by Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka, written in 1931 but never translated into English until now, this big 560-page brick of a book is a tornado of fresh air blowing into your reading experience, brutally honest, compulsively paced--a slightly surreal tale with a hypnotic narrative voice that crackles with cynicism and irony and yet remains touchingly human, all of it rippling with gallows humor. It's smart, heady stuff, with the subtle thrill of genius. It's addicting. After a couple hundred pages, the book begins to seem way too short.

The story is a sinuous surprise. You can only grip this hefty tome in both hands and read in horrified fascination as the plot deftly sets off on its own journey, from mental institution to prison hospital to penal colony, full of unexpected detours from the tropics to the North Pole.

As a narrator, Georg is cynical, opinionated and constantly withholding information. He refuses to talk about some topics, like the murder of his wife. Yet his scorn for sentimentality is refreshing, and you learn to see through his harsh judgments, frequently growing to love the very people that he scorns.

For a novel so large, it has relatively few characters, but those few become almost mythic in their imaginative power. There's March, the handsome young prisoner who's chained wrist-to-wrist to Georg and falls in love with him. There's Walter, another doctor and his childhood hero, and Brigadier General Carolus, who would rather make charts than deal with anyone's body.

The novel is strewn with unforgettable images. A bloody laboratory dog with skull partially exposed breaks free of its straps and runs into a classroom of medical students. A burial at sea goes wrong, and the body floats back up to the surface to be played with by dolphins.

Oh, and rats are everywhere in the novel. They torment the convicts in the tropical penal colony. They battle the crew for possession of an ice-trapped ship at the North Pole. And in the flashbacks, they infest the home of Georg Letham's childhood, where his father has devised a particularly hideous trap for them. One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the novel is Georg's father forcing the little boy to kill a rat.

Out of such grim material Weiss creates a literary world of pure reading joy. We're so lucky Joel Rotenberg took the time to give us a fine translation and that Archipelago Books took a chance on publishing it. Read it slowly. Savor it sentence by sentence. Enjoy the bracing, invigorating slap of real literature.--Nick DiMartino

5.0 out of 5 stars Social Critique At Its Best, December 6, 2011

By 

Man of La Book (NJ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer (Paperback)

Georg Letham: Physi­cian and Mur­derer by Ernst Weiss is a fic­tional book and a Ger­man clas­sic. The book has been recently trans­lated to Eng­lish by Joel Roten­berg.

Georg Letham is unhappy in his mar­riage but happy in his research. When the oppor­tu­nity knocks he injects his older, wealth­ier and well insured wife with the lethal poi­son Agent Y. How­ever, as good as a physi­cian as Georg is he botches up the cover-up. Not only does he leave the syringe in the crime scene but also con­fesses to his father, an offi­cial in the Aus­trian bureaucracy.

Letham gets sen­tenced to a penal colony and con­tin­ues to research yel­low fever being allowed to use meth­ods he would never have been able to use in civil­ian life.

I was rec­om­mended Georg Letham: Physi­cian and Mur­derer by Ernst Weiss, a Ger­man speak­ing Aus­trian Jew, by a fel­low book blog­ger, Amy from The Black Sheep Dances. I have great respect for Amy and her taste is sim­i­lar to mine, com­bine that with the fact that the book was pub­lished by Arch­i­pel­ago Books and that the book was praised by giants of lit­er­a­ture, it was a no brainer.

How­ever, I had to admit that I had trou­ble to get through the sec­ond quar­ter of the book. I even had to put it down for a bit, read another book and get back to it. I have been try­ing to fig­ure out why - maybe my mind wasn't into it, maybe it was the dis­qui­et­ing nar­ra­tive, the prose, I had no idea why.

I could only read this book in small sec­tions. It was inter­est­ing for 75-100 pages or so and then I sim­ply had to put it down.

This book was dis­turb­ing.

After I fin­ished, I didn't sit down and write my thoughts imme­di­ately, I rarely do that any­way, but I let the novel sink in and then it donned on me - this novel is psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror at its best. Not the hor­ror nov­els one thinks about these days, but psychological-Gothic hor­ror which could hold its own against such mas­ters as Poe and Kafka.

I am not a big fan of hor­ror or gore, I've seen enough in the army to last me a life­time but this kind of hor­ror is dif­fer­ent. The unease of revul­sion and shock which accom­pa­nies the inter­nal thoughts and con­flicts of a mur­der­ous man, not a mad man mind you, but a cal­cu­lat­ing, smart per­son whose first and fore­most thought is to ben­e­fit mankind, which, coin­ci­den­tally, he doesn't even like and acknowl­edges his lack of sen­si­tiv­ity to his fel­low human beings.

If one could write a book about the inter­nal feel­ings of Hitler, Mus­solini, Stalin or any other man who brings night­mares to life - this would be it.

Mr. Weiss' vision of his nar­ra­tor is social cri­tique at its best, a look­ing glass into the trans­for­ma­tion of soul of a man who believes he can­not win over nature, that he is sim­ply an exper­i­ment as are all of us humans and that we are no bet­ter than the rats he talks so much about. The author under­stood the con­cept of "herd men­tal­ity" and it's cer­tainly some­thing to keep in mind this time of year when you rush through the doors of your favorite store to by some idi­otic toy.

The book, while long, is actu­ally a series of short sto­ries with some very dis­turb­ing scenes involv­ing dogs and mainly rats, and rats, and some more rats. The writ­ing style which involves sto­ries within sto­ries, when done right, could be bril­liant, how­ever the con­struc­tion of the story (not the trans­la­tion) is clunky but that could be on pur­pose due to the skep­ti­cal and ironic rela­tion­ship Georg Letham has with him­self. A cold, cal­cu­lat­ing man (imag­ine House or Holmes with­out the side­kicks which keep them grounded) who con­vinces him­self that he is in the right com­mit­ting crimes using pas­sion as his logic instead of rea­son and intel­lect for which he jus­ti­fies every­thing else.

Disclaimer: I got this book for free.

5.0 out of 5 stars Georg Letham--cynic, rationalist, man of science, murderer, October 24, 2010

By 

Michael Travis (Kalamazoo, MI United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer (Paperback)

"I had always had the ill-fated ability to awaken trust in people," states Dr. Georg Letham shortly after his arrival at the penal colony called C., with his characteristic aplomb. Dr. Letham is a man of science, of reason--and characteristically has disdain for emotion and instinct, both being irrational. And yet, both emotion and instict crop up, much to his consternation.

As noted by other reviewers, Dr. Letham has been convicted and exiled for the murder of his wife, and act that was premeditated, carefully thought out, and also instinctual at the same time. For reasons unknown to himself, he confesses the crime to his father, and fails to destroy the evidence. The marriage was not happy, made out of convenience, as she had the money necessary for him to carry out his experiments, and to cover his gambling debts. He finds her physically and sexually repulsive, and describes her in almost doll-like terms at times: "She doubled over in pain, her enamel mask twitched like a fish, but suddenly a sentimental, sensual smile came to her lips, she threw herself at my feet, and when I pushed her away, disliking such theatrical scenes, she crawled after me, she began to giggle coyly, and the more brutally I kicked her, the more blissful she became.

"And the ghastliest thing of all was that her arousal was transmitted to me, that she overpowered me sexually. Ugly, aging, with gold-rimmed porcelain teeth, enameled face, wrinkled, perfumed-scorched skin--what is the point of enumerating all her physical imperfections, down to the singed smell of her body--she was stronger than I." Such is the typical tone, sometimes grotesquely comic. Obviously, he has no remorse for her death, and the report that he is writing--something of an experiment on himself, is not to be fully trusted. At times, he comes across as rather brutally honest, at other times avoiding subjects that he does not want to discuss. Another example, again speaking of his marriage: "This little dog, as innocent as it was, became the source of new conflict. The howling of which I spoke just now must have been an expression of its terror of me. And the terror experienced by this thinking, feeling animal (albeit one with thoughts and feelings quite different from those of a person) was not entirely without foundation. For that little dog, which had mysteriously vanished some weeks earlier, had been found unexpectedly by my wife and the young doctor in the basement rooms of the clinic, shut in an animal cage made of heavy iron wire....I do not wish to make myself out to be better than I am. I had lured it there one day, and the only reason it had managed to cling to its miserable life in the dark cellar as long as it did was that dogs were poorly suited to my experiments of the time."

I hope that this gives you at least a little taste of what is in store. Georg Letham is one of the great unhinged characters of literature. Capable of self-deception at times, with remorse for the crime he has committed, he is also capable of some deeper insights, though even these are rather cynical: "Only fate can kill with impunity. The state: war. Nature: yellow fever, typhus, cancer, pulmonary tuberculosis, and other fine inventions of God. Hunger and the struggle for existince. All will continue as long as the world exists."

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is big, rich book. All anyone can do is give some small examples of what awaits.