Two or Three Years Later: Forty-Nine Digressions

Two or Three Years Later: Forty-Nine Digressions

Working in the traditions of Robert Walser, Robert Pinget, and Laurence Sterne, Ror Wolf creates strangely entertaining and condensed stories that call into question the very nature of what makes a story a story. Almost an anti-book, Two or Three Years Later: Forty-Nine Digressions takes as its basis the small, diurnal details of life, transforming these oft-overlooked ordinary experiences of nondescript people in small German villages into artistic meditations on ambiguity, repetition, and narrative. Incredibly funny and playful, Two or Three Years Later is unlike anything you've ever read, from German or any other language. These stories of men observing other men, of men who may or may not have been wearing a hat on a particular Monday (or was it Tuesday?), are delightful word-puzzles that are both intriguing and enjoyable. Ror Wolf is an artist, an author of prose and poetry, and a writer of radio plays and 'radio collages'. His writing has earned him many awards, including Radio Play of the Year, the Kassel Literature Prize for Grotesque Humor, and the Literature Award of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. Jennifer Marquart studied German and translation at the University of Rochester. She has lived, continued her studies, and taught in Cologne and Berlin. "Wolf refuses to let readers find the stable hold of realist fiction in his narratives, yet he does so without resorting to surrealist trickery―for that alone already the pieces are of interest; it's not something one sees often."―Ror Wolf, The Complete Review "Wolf's book is fast, sometimes outrageous, and always surreal."―Shaun Randol, World Literature Today "Ror Wolf's miniature stories about everyday catastrophes undermine traditional storytelling. They are extremely fresh and incredibly funny."―Martin Halter, Tagesanzeiger "Wolf takes familiar scraps from crime, romance, and adventure stories, rearranges them and glues them together with a melodious language that drives everything to the extreme. The result is purely absurd and at the same time magical."―Peter Zemla, Buchjournal "One of the most important contemporary German writers."―Brigitte Kronauer, Büchner Award recipient "Ror Wolf has rejected every typical form of storytelling. What is the reader left with? A particular lightness in one's head, a bright glimpse into the madness of daily life."― Deutschlandradio Kultur "I don't have a book to review by a surrealist German author and poet who wrote forty-nine digressions that each barely spanned the length of a single page. I've never read such a thing. I also don't have a thing to report to you about the devastating effects of firing a bullet into a person's urethra, because the author in question has asked me not to relay this information. I have never and most certainly not at a convention of plumbers lectured on the duties of newly elected government officials to a packed audience and then retold an anecdote about the experience later. I know not a single thing about any Sound Expansion Plans and I've never uttered a single bad word towards any of the members of the men's choir of Nevada. Furthermore, it's patently false that I repeated a story to multiple parties regarding the tremendous yawning of a New York salesman who turned the corner of 82nd Street at nightfall. That I have, at one time or another, placed sticks of dynamite on my head and then attached their fuses to a kitchen timer, is completely made up. It is not true. The only truth is that every one of these events was not described by me, but by the author of the aforementioned digressions which I've allegedly never read, and which some seem to claim that I did not enjoy. But that is not the point of this review."―Aaron Westerman, Typographical Era Ror Wolf is an artist, an author of prose and poetry, and a writer of radio plays and 'radio collages'. His writing has earned him many awards, including Radio Play of the Year, the Kassel Literature Prize for Grotesque Humor, and the Literature Award of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. Jennifer Marquart studied German and translation at the University of Rochester. She has lived, continued her studies, and taught in Cologne and Berlin. TWO OR THREE YEARS LATER: FORTY-NINE DIGRESSIONS By ROR WOLF, Jennifer Marquart OPEN LETTER Copyright © 2007 Schöffling & Co. Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, Frankfurt am Main All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-934824-70-2 Contents In the Mountains...........................................................3Neither in Schleiz, nor Anywhere Else in the World.........................4Various Ways to Lose Peace of Mind.........................................6Laughter...................................................................7An Approximately Forty-Year-Old Man........................................8In a French Kitchen. In a Swiss Lake. In a Berlin Closet...................9The District Office Employee Outing........................................10The Current Conditions i