Buchcover - Journey through a Tragicomic Century - ISBN 978-3-86391-257-4
Bühnenbild - Journey through a Tragicomic Century - ISBN 978-3-86391-257-4
'... particularly peculiar, breath-taking and worth telling.'
Alexander Solloch, NDR Kultur
'Francis Nenik tells [...] this man’s story from his birth in 1911 to his years in the KPD, in Nazi imprisonment, in the Wehrmacht, the new beginning, via sudden twists, crashes, departures. He has found a tone that corresponds to his hero’s defiant independence.'
Süddeutsche Zeitung
'With an inclination for the apparently tangential, precise research and a generous portion of linguistic confidence, Francis Nenik pulls off the trick of distilling a kind of micro-history of the absurd 20th century itself out of the life of a wrongly forgotten man.'
Deutschlandfunk Büchermarkt
'Nenik seems not only to be a researcher as obsessive as he is gifted, with the nose of a truffle hog. He can also write. And how. In his pleasantly dimensioned 192-pager, luscious elements of Anglophone historians’ narrative talent, including first-person perspective, are wedded with the picaresque novelist’s lust for imaginative style.'
Sächsische Zeitung
'... a vividly written slice of German history – which finds suitable form in this mixture of non-fiction and novel.'
MDR Kultur
'... history written as we have never read before, fast-paced, subjective and funny.'
The Daily Frown
Journey through a Tragicomic Century
The Absurd Life of Hasso Grabner
von Francis Nenik, aus dem Deutschen übersetzt von Katy DerbyshireFrancis Neniks „Reise durch ein tragikomisches Jahrhundert“ handelt vom Leben des vergessenen Schriftstellers Hasso Grabner — erzählt mit großer Freude am Fabulieren und Liebe zur Absurdität. Die Reise führt uns nebst anderen Stationen von den Jungen Kommunisten Leipzigs in den 1920er Jahren nach Korfu, ganz nah begleiten wir Grabner auf seinem wilden Ritt vom Stahlwerksdirektor zum verunglimpften Autor, dem es verboten war, sein Werk in der DDR zu veröffentlichen.