Overview

Emil Lanz, an Austrian translator living in Venice, suffers a mid-life crisis and is about to commit suicide when he witnesses a murder. Mobsters burn his house and threaten his life, but he fights back and, in turn, kills two of his pursuers. Though he survives, his previous routine is destroyed . . . then rebuilt, thanks to an eccentric billionaire. He frequently questions the evolving situation: Is it a new reality? A consequence of his suicide that has transported him to a new dimension, to an afterlife? Or has he gone mad and is now in an insane asylum? Author Gerhard Roth was born in Graz in 1942, the son of a medical doctor and a nurse. He originally intended to study medicine, but soon discontinued his studies. For ten years Roth worked as a computer programmer to support his growing family, but since the mid-1970s he has been exclusively a writer. His major works consist of a cycle of seven novels, Die Archive des Schweigens (The Archives of Silence), and another novel cycle, Orkus (Hades). His work has earned extensive critical acclaim over the years, including the Döblin Prize (1983), the Kreisky Prize (2002), and the Grand Austrian State Prize (2016), among many others.

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9781572412323

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"""Gerhard Roth's Hell Is Empty - And All the Devils Are Here! appears at a time of confusing social climate change, a time of dissolving structures, the existence of which was sometimes viewed as a law of nature. The structures always dissolve and you adapt or move away. Amazingly, Venice is a city that reflects this change in a microscopic way. [...] Gerhard Roth describes aspects of this change in the fate of his protagonist Lanz. The existential pain, the inability of people to communicate with each other without lying, doesn't just bother him. ""Life is over people's heads,"" said Emil Lanz' mother, an osteopath, about her patients. Lanz's dealings with his wife Alma and his environment seem determined by speechlessness and strangeness."" -Almut Oetjen, Belletristik-Couch ""If Venice actually sank one day [...], a rough plan of the vanished cluster of islands could be drawn up with the help of Roth's almost cartographically based Venice novels."" -Profil ""A mixture of amazing coincidences, tourist interest and criminal mystery."" -Oberösterreichisches Volksblatt ""One of the greatest pleasures of the moment is to walk through Venice and see the cruel and beautiful in these three books."" -Kurier"

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