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The System of Vienna: From Heaven Street to Earth Mound Square

An astonishing and fantastical autobiographical novel — reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Laurence Sterne — The System of Vienna details Jonke’s travels through Vienna by streetcar, reporting the bizarre and frustrating encounters he experiences as he progresses — and meanwhile moving not just from trolley-stop to trolley-stop, but through life as well, from innocence to disillusionment, birth to death. Jonke meets a paranoiac fish wholesaler who believes he is directing all of Austrian politics from his little stall, a stamp collector in such deadly earnest he hopes to be appointed to a professorship in philately, and a compulsive talker who has developed a rigorous economic philosophy out of the most common objects to be found in a Vienna neighborhood. Slowly increasing the comic and fantastic elements in his story until they overwhelm all pretense to autobiography — culminating in a strangely touching love scene between Jonke and a caryatid — The System of Vienna reminds us that the very act of describing a life turns it into fiction.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 120
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781564785503
  • Genres
  • fiction
  • Release date
  • 2009