Youth - (German Literature) by Wolfgang Koeppen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Wolfgang Koeppen is the most important German novelist of the past seventy years: a radical, not to say terrifying, stylist; a caustic, jet-black comedian; a bitter prophet. His late, autobiographical work--the short, intense autofiction, Youth, translated here for the first time--is a portrait of the little north German town of Greifswald before World War I, and is a miracle of compression: this is not historical fiction, but a kind of personal apocalypse. Also included here, in Michael Hofmann's brilliant translation, is one of Koeppen's very last works: a short, fragmentary text spoken over a 1990 German television program depicting his return visit to the town of his schooldays.

Review Quotes

The whorl of [Wolfgang] Koeppen's fragments is always steeled by his precision and capacity for revelation, and each word in [Michael] Hofmann's translation feels fixed in place as though it were a mortared brick. This final work from this German master is a brackish jewel.--Scott Esposito"Times Literary Supplement" (01/01/0001)

This dazzlingly oblique late work explains and elaborates one man's personal odyssey and also that of a society inching towards atrocity.--Eileen Battersby"The Irish Times" (01/01/0001)

It is hard to think of a German writer of his generation who has written more sensitively or more profoundly about the Holocaust and its effects than Wolfgang Koeppen.--Ruth Franklin, New Republic

"It is hard to think of a German writer of his generation who has written more sensitively or more profoundly about the Holocaust and its effects than Wolfgang Koeppen." -- Ruth Franklin, New Republic

About the Author

Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1996) is the author of A Sad Affair, Pigeons on the Grass, Death in Rome, The Hothouse, and Journey through America, all of which are available in English translation. He is widely considered the most influential postwar German novelist of his generation.