Sold to Finland: DARKENBLOOM by Eva Menasse
Eva Menasse’s epic novel DARKENBLOOM will be published in Finnish translation by Siltala and we could not be more happy!
- Rights sold to: Croatia: optioned / France: Editions Stock / World English: Scribe Publications / Italy: Bompiani / Netherlands: AtlasContact / Norway: Forlaget Press / NEW Finland: Silatal
- A SPIEGEL bestseller !
- Raving press in Germany !
Recently published in the Danish newspaper Politiken, Christian Johannes Idskov on Eva Menasse:
The novel promises to be the release of the year in German-speaking countries. Die Zeit’s reviewer has called it a masterpiece and a stroke of genius. In Denmark, we have to make do with two of Menasse’s short story collections…
Her writing is so frosty and biting, so light and effortless, that her language often appears as memorable snapshots of the most repulsive aspects of the human animal: its arrogance, sadism, stubbornness, brutality and self-righteousness.
Eva Menasse may well become the next great writer of Austrian literature. If she isn’t already.
and more press, from Germany:
Eva Menasse has produced a masterpiece. […] While none of these motifs that Eva Menasse invokes are new, it feels like you’re experiencing them here for the first time in Technicolor and Dolby Stereo. How does she do this? Entirely through language. And that is why Darkenbloom is a novel that will last. […] As a novel, Darkenbloom is both a gripping linguistic thrill and a thriller – a thriller about coming to terms with the past. Until the very end, you want to know who knew what, and what they covered up or hushed up. The way Eva Menasse spreads this information throughout the novel in such a way that every word dropped at the beginning is resolved at the end and the suspense grows page after page is absolutely masterful. […] Eva Menasse’s novel is a stroke of genius. – DIE ZEIT
Darkenbloom stirs up, saddens, pulls you along – especially through its characters and is undoubtedly one of the most important books of this fall. Great. – NDR
Not a reunification novel, nor a key novel: Eva Menasse’s new novel Darkenbloom is something better. In a bitterly comic way, it turns a historical event into the background of a small-town portrait in 1989 […] But where is Darkenbloom’s third master builder, besides God and the Devil, the novel’s author? She’s there just two sentences later in all her sarcasm: „You wish God could only see into the houses and not the hearts.“ Only literature should dare to look into dark souls. Literature like this. – FAZ
Eva Menasse has succeeded in writing an unobtrusively dense novel that lets the silence roar. One cannot escape it. – Kurier
She found the motto of the third part of this exciting, eventful and always different book that goes up against a great thundering silence and repression in Robert Musil: „Historical is that which one would not do oneself.“ Literature can speak of more than simple truths. In this beautiful case, it makes clear how opposites clash even in the most intimate community. It may be that the great world theatre takes place elsewhere. The swamp of mysteries, one learns in this great and never long-winded book, „has always exceeded those of solved cases many times over.“ – Mannheimer Morgen
Camouflage and exposure, mystery and malice, memory and life lies, historical lies, the colportage of lies of an entire country […] all this is presented lightly and in an anxiety-inducing satirical manner, which on the one hand brings the characters close to the audience and on the other exposes those who allow themselves to be seduced by them. An ambitious, ravishingly mocking narrative project, impressively mastered by Eva Menasse. – literaturhaus.at
[Eva Menasse] succeeds in packing the horror into a beautiful, almost warm-hearted language – without, of course, trivialising it. Her laconic language is sometimes reminiscent of that of Wolf Haas, her characters, especially the red-nosed drunkards, are drawn with such precision as if they had sprung from a cartoon by the Lower Austrian Manfred Deix. Darkenbloom is an eerie as well as funny novel about dealing with the past. Where some people struggle with it and where the wounds do not heal, others drink their past away until the memory of it fades. – Badische Zeitung
With Darkenbloom, author Eva Menasse presents an eloquent anti-homeland novel, very much in the tradition of other works by Austrian authors who throw coarse-grained salt into those same open wounds and watch with great pleasure as everything ferments and pops and bursts. […] Menasse dishes it out hard. But she does so in a quiet, often witty tone that exposes the inner life and the power struggle of these turncoat villagers of Darkenbloom all the more perfidiously. One of the great strengths of the novel lies in the very fine ramifications, the ends of the bloodlines that have permeated the fictional Darkenbloom for a hundred years. – NZZ
What remains? „This is not the end of the story,“ is Menasse’s last sentence. Darkenbloom’s secret – what happened on the night of the massacre of the Jewish forced labourers and where their grave lies – remains hidden. Under the layers of remembrance and the icing of repression. This is quite coherent. Eva Menasse has created a worthy literary monument to Austria’s politics of the past. – Falter
„An outstanding novel.“ – Druckfrisch
„Menasse does not resolve the contradictory stories told about the past in Darkenbloom, she lets them stand side by side. This creates a kaleidoscopic world that develops a pull one can hardly escape. A world that is at the same time precise and specific – and yet universal, because in these people is reflected what is also possible elsewhere. […] This is literature, great literature even.“ SPIEGEL
„DARKENBLOOM is a satire on the politics of a small town. Every character in this town has his or her own unique language and this just shows one more time how ambitious Eva Menasse is in her storytelling.“ – WDR2
„How do we remember „correctly“? How do we deal with joint knowledge and guilt? What are the consequences of (collective) silence and repression? Eva Menasse’s darkly sarcastic portrait of Austria as a breeding ground for old and new anti-Semitism deals with this. There are crimes over which dust never settles.“ – Buchkultur Spezial