Overview

The horror of the main charcters fall is emphasised by the matter-of-fact sobriety of the author's narrative style.

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9781903517109

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First English translation of a bleak 1928 novel by a forgotten Czech member of the generation of Doblin, Brecht, and Werfel. It's a closely concentrated analysis of the frail psyche of obscure bank clerk Franz Polzer, a timid paranoid whose obsessive pursuit of order and control lead ironically to helpless explosions of irrationality and violence, and to his eventual undoing. Ungar's understated prose (perfectly captured by veteran translator Mitchell) trains a cold clinical eye on the processes through which Polzer-in effect, a country mouse adrift in a wicked city-is seduced by his promiscuous landlady and misled by his satanic best friend, a moribund, wheelchair-bound misanthrope, thus set on a path toward self-destruction. Unusual and unsettling: what a film it would make. (Kirkus Reviews)

First published in 1927 and now translated into English for the first time, this is the bleak and disturbing story of Polzer, a reclusive bank clerk living in Prague. He is a man wracked by guilt, obsessiveness, insecurity and, above all, a deep hatred and revulsion for women, brought about by events in his childhood. Change is his enemy and for years he manages to live in obscurity in his one-room lodgings, polishing his shoes for half an hour a day, going to work, counting his possessions and exchanging no more than a few words with his widowed landlady. However, his ordered existence comes to a sudden end when the landlady accuses him of treating her like a servant and, out of sheer guilt, he invites her to accompany him on his Sunday afternoon walk. Her inevitable and irresistible sexual advances set in motion a grisly and seemingly unstoppable chain of events which culminates in a shocking and chilling murder. A sparse narrative style emphasizes the isolation of Polzer and the inexorability of his fall. There is no relief from the blackness and despair in which he finds himself, surrounded as he is by a cast of grotesques, physical and emotional cripples, disgustingly obese, rancid with disease. There is no sense of the possibility of spiritual regeneration, no light at the end of the tunnel. In a helpful foreword, the translator places this virtually unheard-of author and his work in the context of other German writers of the same period who have left an enduring legacy such as Brecht and Kafka. While he shares some similarities with these writers, it is, Mitchell argues, the uncompromising bleakness of Ungar's work, the lack of any spiritual dimension, that has ensured that he has been left in relative obscurity. Perhaps this new translation will help introduce him to a wider audience. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

"Hermann Ungar (1893-1920) was a German-speaking Jew from Moravia who was active as a writer in Berlin and Prague in the 1920s. Critics spoke of him in the same breath as Kafka, and he was feted in France after the publication of the translation of The Maimed in 1928. After the war he was forgotten in Germany, despite praise from individual writers, but the reissue of the French translation in 1987 was again greeted with enthusiastic reviews: ' ""Herman Ungar is a great writer, unique... No history of literature should ignore his works.""'"

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