Will to Sickness — Gerhard Roth

Fiction. Translated from the German by Tristram Wolff. The latest release in Burning Deck's Dichten series focusing on contemporary German writers, THE WILL TO SICKNESS is Gerhard Roth's classic 1973 novella. It reveals Roth's "objective prose" at its finest, where aggregates of particular impressions merge with a quasi-scientific emphasis on individual minute details. The effect of this prose is surreal with an undertone of Angst that perceives anything as strange and menacing, the product of a hard-edged exploration of the strangeness of perception itself. "Shutting the window Kalb caught sight of himself for a moment in the mirror of the windowpane: his eyeballs looked exactly like a set of fried eggs"-from THE WILL TO SICKNESS.