Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst

by Marianne Fritz

Marianne Fritz’ großer Roman Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst steht wohl einzigartig da in der Gegenwartsliteratur; – dies gilt für die Erzählsprache des Werks, die über die gewohnten Grenzen der Beschreibungs- und Erfahrungsvielfalt hinausgreift und neue Bewußtseinsinhalte in der Sprache selbst eröffnet; dies gilt auch für den Inhalt des Romans, der ein Gesamtpanorama menschlicher Existenzweisen beschreibt und eine poetische Universallandschaft vor dem Leser entfaltet, in der er sich verlieren, wiederfinden kann.

Der Roman Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst erschließt eine ganze Lebenswelt; er macht eine Wirklichkeit zugänglich, die nicht nur historisch bestimmbare, konkrete Wirklichkeit ist, sondern auch zurückreicht in die Mythen der Menschheitsgeschichte und vorausweist in Gegenwart und Zukunft.

Genres: German Literature

3392 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Marianne Fritz (1948–2007) was an Austrian novelist. Her first book, The Weight of Things, marked the beginning of an ambitious cycle of novels with the overarching title of Festung, or “The Fortress,” comprising Das Kind der Gewalt und die Sterne der Romani, Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst, and the gargantuan Naturgemäß, the third volume of which she was preparing at the time of her death.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Translate please!

Der Spiegel review ::
http://magazin.spiegel.de/EpubDeliver...

[Danke=Thanks Matt!]


Ali's comment ::
"Marianne Fritz. English scholarship on Fritz in general and her last two massive novels in particular is scant, to say the least (she's venerated among Austrian elitists, though), but critics have been helpfully hostile to her unreadybabble prose (her proofreader stopped correcting errors after a thousand pages of Dessen Sprache du nicht Verstehst because it was impossible to distinguish legitimate mistakes from deliberate lingualistic mangulations, and she's even got a footstamp of disapproval from Thomas Bernhard!) and I'm seeing stylistic and typographic echoes of Schmidt/bpNichol/maybe/possibly/Brooke-Rose?"
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The two links he provides ::
http://www.themodernnovel.com/austria...
http://www.asymptotejournal.com/artic...

Wiki=link ::
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne...

[Lukas Schmutzer]

Most of the early reviews did not originate in a reading of the novel, but rather from many prejudices.
It’s quite a shame that there is so few useful secondary literature on this work, which may be one of the most complex epics of the 20th century – together with the works of Joyce, Proust or Musil.

Reviews that I could recommend are by Köhlmeier, Liessmann, Dath, Rathjen, but I'm afraid they are buried deep somewhere in archives (some of them are preserved by the "Literaturhaus Wien", in case you live nearby).

One recent text worth noting is this one:
http://www.academia.edu/4355277/Maria...

Also, there is a short book (based on a viennese conference), ed. by K. Kastberger: "Nullgeschichte, die trotzdem war" (Wien: Sonderzahl 1995), and there is the chapter "Geschichte im Sprachzerfall" in "Ohne Mitleid" by Konrad Paul Liessmann (Wien: Passagen 1991).

And, Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler spoke about the novel in his lectures:
https://books.google.at/books?isbn=37...

I hope this information can help those who find interest in this unique work of art.