Author(s): Marianne Fritz

Novel | Fiction Reductions | Read our reviews! | Translated fiction | Historical

Description: The Weight of Things is the first book by Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948-2007), and the first to be translated into English. After winning acclaim with this novel - awarded the Robert Walser Prize in 1978 - she embarked on a brilliant and ambitious literary project called 'The Fortress,' which earned her cult status, comparisons to James Joyce, and admirers including Elfriede Jelinek and W. G. Sebald. Yet in this, her first novel, we discover not an eccentric fluke of a literary nature but rather the work of a brilliant and masterful satirist, philosophically minded yet raging with anger and wit, who under the guise of a domestic horror story manages to expose the hypocrisy and deep abiding cruelties running parallel, over time, through the society and the individual minds of a century. Review: "Written in a brisk tone that disguises its destination, this slow-burning horror story steps quietly and methodically into a heart of familial darkness...The war haunts this novel, adding to the weight of everyday things and everyday evils that Fritz so ingeniously dissects." New York Times "Fritz won the Kafka Prize in 2001 and her work, like his, is both deeply upsetting and profound. Her translator writes in his 'Afterword' that 'there is a class of artists whose work is so strange and extraordinary that it eschews all gradations of the good and the mediocre: genius and madness are the only descriptors adequate to its scale,' and he situates Fritz quite forcefully in this class. He seems to be correct." Chicago Tribune "Fritz's poetic auscultation of this weight, this madness, is absolutely astounding, both in its scope and its subtlety. It is difficult to summarize her methods, as they are woven so seamlessly into the narrative...She describes a palpable environment of disorientation and loss, set against a tapestry of gray skies, war-ruined structures, and dark woods into which people disappear." Entropy     Author Biography: Marianne Fritz (1948-2007) was an Austrian novelist. She is known for an ambitious cycle of novels with the overarching title "The Fortress," comprising The Child of Violence and the Stars of the Romani, Whose Language You Don't Understand, and the gargantuan Naturally, which she was preparing at the time of her death.

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
The degree of control any of us have over our life is undoubtedly, if measured against the degree of force bearing down on us in the form of history, negligible, but we are generally spared realisation of the full extent of this negligibility unless history rolls more heavily upon us, especially if we are constituted to, or are caused to, lie where its tread impacts uncushioned upon its path. History hits the unfortunate hardest: those at the bottom of the heap, so to call it, are society’s most expendable and the first to absorb the impact of the weight of things. Our social structures are largely concerned with positioning others to take our place in the way of approaching disaster. Marianne Fritz’s novel The Weight of Things is written is a brisk, almost satirical tone, yet it slowly, as it jumps back and forth in time, closing in on the pivotal act of the book, reveals depths of suffering and harm absorbed by its most vulnerable characters. What does it mean to survive when others do not survive? What does it mean to have a body following a disaster that deprived so many of theirs (and that continues to press itself towards the destruction of the bodies of the survivors)? Following the Second World War, Berta learns from Wilhelm that Rudolph, the music teacher whose child she carries, has been killed, and that Rudolph has charged Wilhelm to care for Berta. He marries her and she bears two children: Little Rudolph and Little Berta. The attention shown Berta by the two men draws the envy of Berta’s sister Wilhelmina, who is intent on poisoning the relationship and taking Berta’s place. The doubling of the characters’ names: Berta/Little Berta, Rudolph/Little Rudolph, Wilhelm/Wilhelmina serves to further depersonalise the forces that act through them, limited as they are in their capacities to understand those forces, as well as to manifest the contrapuntal musical structure of the novel. Wilhelm, with his job as a ‘chauffeur and come-hither boy’ for an aristocratic playboy, puts his employer’s interests before those of his family, and, with his ‘chauffeur philosophy’ (he extols the virtues of seeing obstacles early enough to avoid them), preserves his ignorance and passivity as Berta falls under the weight of things. Despite the love she expends on her children, Berta cannot see them ultimately as anything other than failed creations for which she is responsible, in a world in which a worthwhile life is impossible. The act she commits is so much a result of the mental collapse which manifests itself in her, though its mechanisms remain beyond her and opaque to her, that it is not inconsistent with her natural fatalism and resignation (the weight of things having conditioned her to its irresistibility). The frame narrative of this multitemporal novel has Wilhelm and Wilhelmina visiting Berta in the psychiatric hospital (or ‘fortress’) in which she is contained, where a final cruelty is visited upon her and she commits the ultimate resignation, demonstrating that more harm can be done to subjectivity that its removal from the world.