Walter Kappacher: Der Fliegenpalast (Palace of Flies)

The latest addition to my website is Walter Kappacher‘s Der Fliegenpalast (Palace of Flies) the novel is set over ten days in August 1924 in the Austrian mountain resort of Bad Fusch and follows the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal who is there to complete three of his works, two of which, we know, he will never complete. He struggles throughout the book, unable to write much, worried about being pestered but yet aware fame is fleeting. He has health problems and has a dizzy spell. (He will die five years later.) He wants to be undisturbed, yet misses intelligent conversation which he will find with Dr Krakauer, the doctor who attends him after his dizzy spell and who is the personal doctor of a baroness. He looks back to his childhood, as he frequently visited Bad Fusch with his parents. Though only fifty, he behaves like an old man, complaining about how things are not how they used to be. Kappacher gives us a first-class portrait of an artist who is seemingly lost and unsure of himself and the world around him.

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