The Weight of Things

The first of the late Marianne Fritz’s works to be translated into English. This dark gem of a novel swerves from uneasy pantomime comedy to sheer domestic horror. Fritz has a clammy handle on all that makes humans miserable: roll up for the horrors of jealousy war confinement mental illness regret and unhappy motherhood.<br><br><i>The Weight of Things</i> is the first book and the first translated book by Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948–2007). After winning acclaim with this novel—awarded the Robert Walser Prize in 1978—she embarked on a brilliant and ambitious literary project called “The Fortress” which earned her cult status comparisons to James Joyce and admirers including Elfriede Jelinek and W. G. Sebald.<br><br>Yet in this her first novel we discover not an eccentric fluke of literary nature but rather a brilliant and masterful satirist philosophically minded yet raging with anger and wit who under the guise of a domestic horror story manages to expose the hypocrisy and deep abiding cruelties running parallel over time through the society and the individual minds of a century.