Friday, October 10, 2008

Review of Maxim Biller

In The New Republic Francesca Mari reviews Maxim Biller's Love Today, a collection of short stories , published by Simon & Schuster and translated from the German by Anthea Bell.

An excerpt:

Biller's fragments are fresh and terrible--terrible being high praise. They are terrible in their effect, in their severe style and harrowing ability to arouse awe and anxiety simultaneously. The collection is called Love Today, which should set off some internal alarms. The two words are--or at least should be-- mutually exclusive. So before going any further, we should clarify that Biller's episodes are actually about the pursuit of love rather than what can assuredly be called love itself. In fact, whether love ever exists is almost impossible to tell. That is the ambiguity that makes Biller's texts so seductive.

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