Twelve Nights [Paperback]

Gerlind Reinshagen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2005

To enter Twelve Nights, you must pass through a fractured threshold, placing one foot in lyric, the other in prose glittering with fairy tale and recent past. Ghosts are abroad; memories strike when least expected, biting like animals. These are the hopeful, forgetful times of reconstruction, where masks are exchanged, friends are mistrusted, and those who learned to survive the war betray signs of madness. “How long does misfortune slumber before it reawakens?” For Reinshagen’s characters, remembrance is a heroic act. Their stories return to history its essential unreality, the inconceivable inseparable from its fact.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Torn as they often are between too much and too little memory, German writers have only recently ventured above ground in their explorations of German wartime and postwar suffering. With this collection of vignettes, prolific playwright Reinshagen courts memory--taunts it, even--as her characters, often little more than oblique sketches, tell their stories of reconstruction. Readers are similarly challenged: to scrounge similarities and sew meaning across Reinshagen's 12 narrative "nights" of varying degrees of darkness. Children play-acting out leg amputations; a white muslin dress dyed black and worn and reworn until shiny; Brother Sisyphus covering his canvases with only white primer--like W. G. Sebald, Reinshagen homes in on memory's affinity for the visually visceral. But such searing flashes of clarity are the exception; generally, this book is as opaque, impressionistic, and poetically messy as memory itself. Readers familiar with the genre will enjoy Reinshagen as a complement to Sebald, Uwe Timm, and Gunter Grass. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

An important figure in contemporary German literature and performance, Gerlind Reinshagen is both novelist and playwright, and a member of PEN Germany. Twelve Nights is her first novel to be translated into English.

Product Details

• Paperback: 140 pages
• Publisher: The Post-Apollo Press (January 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0942996526
• ISBN-13: 978-0942996524
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,899,581 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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