The Olympic Champion (and other selected works)

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Last edited by Tristram Shanty
June 21, 2024 | History

The Olympic Champion (and other selected works)

A selection of filmbooks and plays by the Bavarian writer, painter, and filmmaker Herbert Achternbusch, translated into English for the first time. The volume includes the titles: The Comanche, Susn, Kuschwarda City, The Olympic Champion, The Last Hole, and The Idiot. The works are tragicomic, anarchistic, and absurdist in flavour, always more or less inexorably returning to a local Bavarian milieu which the works nevertheless portray in an ambivalent, critical manner, thus placing the particular in the context of a more universal kind of humanism.

From the description on the publisher's website:

"The filmbooks tend to operate in the mode of dialogue in concert with pointed descriptions of scenes, gestures, and actions (Achternbusch also had a penchant for physical comedy); the plays tend toward the more intimate mode of monologue framed by stripped-down, largely expressive or symbolic settings. Both forms remain experimental and exploratory, their narrative threads always shifting from beginning to end. They present stylistically, tonally distinct iterations of two of Achternbusch’s major gifts as a storyteller: that of constructing an engaging, coherent narrative around wildly absurd premises, and that of developing a broad range of thoughts and emotions without ever breaking the comic mold which energizes the whole and binds it together like a special kind of glue."

Publish Date
Publisher
Editions Cox
Language
English

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Edition Availability
Cover of: The Olympic Champion (and other selected works)
The Olympic Champion (and other selected works)
May 2024, Editions Cox
in English

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Book Details


Edition Notes

Translation Of
Die Olympiasiegerin, Der Depp, Das letzte Loch, Der Comanche, Susn, Kuschwarda City
Translated From
German

Edition Identifiers

Open Library
OL52201624M
ISBN 13
9783982629407

Work Identifiers

Work ID
OL38376104W

Excerpts

HERBERT Does it snow in your camera sometimes? Ilona alone. ILONA You mean the white dots, these little dots. Sometimes these unpleasant snowflakes are nowhere to be seen. As a child, when the ground was covered in snow, I often wished that nothing remained underneath, and when the snow began to melt on the rooftops, I’d wish that when the snow had all melted the roofs would no longer be there. That, after the thaw, no fields and no meadows would remain either. Nothing. It’s the same with photography: you take a picture of a moment, and the moment is already gone. And if you lose the photograph, then nothing at all remains of the moment. I would have loved to have seen myself as an Olympic champion. If the war hadn’t intervened, I’d have competed at the Olympic games in Tokyo. Imagine: to be photographed wearing a gold medal . . . – She stands there in the pose of a champion. HERBERT You would never have become an Olympic champion – you can’t even do a headstand! ILONA A headstand? Time me, see how long I can stand on my head! – She’s already standing on her head, one two three four five, Herbert can be heard counting. He continues to count as he walks away from Ilona, getting louder. Then he starts running: nineteen twenty papa papa –
added by Tristram Shanty.

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