Traumnovelle

<p>Utilizing Wittgenstein Tarkovsky and Arthur Schnitzler as models Grant Maierhofer's <em>Traumnovelle</em> explores history as novel spiraling out from the incident in 1978 when Soviet physicist Anatoli Bugorski unwittingly stuck his head inside the beam of the U-70 Synchrotron particle accelerator in Protvino. In short recursive fragments and interview transcripts <em>Traumnovelle</em> offers a prismatic view extracted from real life a sequence of text and images documenting an obsession. </p><p></p><p>///</p><p></p><p>Grant Maierhofer may be our greatest living novelist of failure. Caught somewhere between the existential perplexities of Beckett and the ontological ones of Kafka-encompassing both of these things somehow in a voice that is plaintive at times hilarious and deeply American-he approaches something that is nearly religious in its intensity. <em>Traumnovelle</em> recasts the terrible story of Anatoli Bugorski the Russian physicist who survived exposure to a proton beam from a particle accelerator into something greater and stronger than mere tragedy something radiant and profoundly illuminating. As with everything Maierhofer writes it is a joy to be alive to read it. -- Matthew Specktor</p><p></p><p>A tonically discomforting brain-stretching virtuosic reimagination of one man's unprecedented horror rendered in ultravivid surpassingly poetic prose Grant Maierhofer's <em>Traumnovelle</em> is work of gutsy and triumphant originality. -- Garielle Lutz</p><p></p><p>I read Grant Maierhofer's philosophic photonic <em>Traumnovelle</em> on a trans-oceanic flight in a sheer dome of electromagnetic radiation and it reminded me that each sentence is a dream hypothesis which at its terminus makes way for the next dream. We call a sequence of such luminous failures a galaxy a line of inquiry a novel a life. -- Joyelle McSweeney</p>