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  The System of Vienna: From Heaven Street to Earth Mound Square (Paperback) By (author) Gert Jonke

  

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  Short Description for The System of ViennaHalf philosopher and half clown-prince, Gert Jonke is Austria s comic gift to contemporary fiction.
  Full description

  • Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
  • Published: 15 December 2009
  • Format: Paperback 120 pages
  • See: Full bibliographic data
  • Categories: Contemporary Fiction
  • ISBN 13: 9781564785503 ISBN 10: 1564785505
  • Sales rank: 345,925

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Full description for The System of Vienna

• An astonishing and fantastical autobiographical novel reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Laurence Sterne The System of Vienna details Jonke s travels through Vienna by streetcar, reporting the bizarre and frustrating encounters he experiences as he progresses and meanwhile moving not just from trolley-stop to trolley-stop, but through life as well, from innocence to disillusionment, birth to death. Jonke meets a paranoiac fish wholesaler who believes he is directing all of Austrian politics from his little stall, a stamp collector in such deadly earnest he hopes to be appointed to a professorship in philately, and a compulsive talker who has developed a rigorous economic philosophy out of the most common objects to be found in a Vienna neighborhood. Slowly increasing the comic and fantastic elements in his story until they overwhelm all pretense to autobiography culminating in a strangely touching love scene between Jonke and a caryatid The System of Vienna reminds us that the very act of describing a life turns it into fiction.