An Evocation of Matthias Stimmberg

Translated by Sarah Pollack / August 2021 / 4.5 x 7, 56 pp. / 978-1-939663-73-3 “Misanthropy is a kind of humanism; humanism is also a kind of misanthropy.” —Matthias Stimmberg A miniature portrait in misanthropy and an oblique account of the trauma that was the twentieth century, An Evocation of Matthias Stimmberg is a Borgesian account of an Austrian writer who despises both the world he lives in and the work he himself has produced. In a sequence of anecdotes imbued with haughty melancholy and nihilistic irony, Alain-Paul Mallard assembles a puzzle of a man whose fragmented life crosses paths with fictional and non-fictional protagonists from Hans Magnus Enzensberger to Paul Celan, and whose concise first-person reflections describe a complicated and sympathetic monster. A masterpiece of the miniature in the tradition of Robert Walser and Fleur Jaeggy and a tribute to the legacy of Thomas Bernhard, Mallard’s “imaginary life” offers a celebration of sterility and silence in its appro