[Zugaxxsn]

Today I finished "Fiasko", a German translation of his novel "a kudarc". It has not, as far as I know, been translated into English yet. It's remarkable. Genius. Possibly overlong, but looking back on it I don't know what I'd cut. A novel within a novel. A writer can't publish his book about the shoah, and stops writing for a while, until he starts to write a novel called "Fiasko" which is about the odyssee of a man through a socialist nightmare country (kafkaesque if I ever saw one), who writes a novel and fails to get it published. The conceit isn't the amazing thing, it's that everything fits. allusions, wordplay, and the harrowing shadow of the Shoah. The first part, before the novel comes, is incredibly well written, shapeshifting, thoughtful, brilliant. The novel within disappointed me at first, it's slower, subtler, it even bored me at times, but lord was I wrong to be disappointed.