Böcker av Alexander Booth

A highly engaging exploration of existential questions, written in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic.  The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul confronts the reader with questions of existential meaning, questions rendered all the more potent by the backdrop of the Coronavirus pandemic: How fragile are we as human beings? How fragile are our societies? What is a "self," an "I,"  a "community"? How are we to orient ourselves? And what, if any, role does commentary play? In a fashion that will be familiar to longtime admirers of Alexander Kluge, the book stretches both back in time to the medieval glossators of Bologna and forward into interstellar space with imagined travel to the moon Europa. Kluge's characteristic brief, vignette-like prose passages are interspersed with images from his own film work and QR codes, forming a highly engaging, thoroughly contemporary read.

An engaging exploration of romance focusing on disparate ages of lovers. Sunday evening, Tegel Airport, Berlin: A woman strikes up a conversation with a man, Robert Sturm, who is thirty-six years old and eighteen years her junior. He is on his way to Siberia and will return the following Saturday. She cannot wait . . . In 1981 she came to West Berlin as an eighteen-year-old to study medicine and met Viktor, who was twice her age. Though he opened the world up to her, he remained closed himself. At the turn of the millennium and thirty-six, she meets Johann. He is thirty-six too. They try to make a life together, but their jobs aren't the only things that are precarious. Saturday morning, Tegel Airport again: For six days, her everyday life and her memories have become entwined. Why are the men in her life always thirty-six? Is she still the person she remembers? Or, being someone who knows their way around the mind, is she in fact what she has forgotten?

Poetic prose meditations translated superbly into English.   Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker is widely considered one of the most important European poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The last book of hers to be published during her lifetime, as mornings and moosgreen I. Step to the window is an elliptical and, if at times cryptic, deeply personal, playful, and highly poetic collection of experiences, memories, dreams, desires, fears, visions, observations, and peregrinations through landscapes both real and imagined. The volume bears witness to her unique late lyrical style of pyrotechnical cut-up. Among many others, her beloved Derrida, Duchamp, Hölderlin, and Jean-Paul all appear, almost like guides, as Mayröcker bravely makes her way through infirmity, old age, and loneliness, prolonging her time as a prolific writer as much as possible.