Landscape In Concrete

(Paperback)

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Description

Sergeant Gauthier Bachmann is the perfect Nazi soldier. But after a horrifying defeat at Voroshenko, where most of his Eighth Hessian Infantry Regiment was slaughtered in a single instant, Bachmann was declared mentally unfit to serve. Incapable of accepting this judgment, and of returning to his girlfriend and a quiet life as a gold- and silversmith, Bachmann wanders the war-ravaged countryside, trying to find a way to rejoin his regiment, or any regiment, and return to the front. Whilst wandering he is tormented by a series of figures from the underbelly of war.

Reviews

"Sometimes war is all one knows. Landscape in Concrete is a novel following one Gauthier Bachmann, an ideal soldier under the Nazi regime. When he is discharged for mental health reasons, he refuses his diagnosis and will do anything to return to the front lines. He quickly becomes and pawn in many Nazi official's actions, in the dark happenings behind the war. Landscape in Concrete is a fine novel of world fiction, expertly translated from the original German by Ralph Manheim."John Burroughs, The Midwest Book Review "Jakov was a bad boy. . . . He was a coyote, a trickster. He enjoyed hash and LSD. A wicked smile played around his mouth, while witty aphorisms and deep insights tripped off his lips. He emanated inner strengthand an electric intelligence that we all wanted to emulate."Anthony Rudolf

Author Bio

Jakov Lind was born in Vienna and survived the Second World War by fleeing into Germany, where he disguised himself as a Dutch deckhand. Regarded in his lifetime as a successor to Beckett and Kafka, Lind was posthumously awarded the Theodor Kramer Prize in 2007. Ralph Manheim was one of the great translators of the twentieth century. He translated Gnter Grass, Bertolt Brecht, Louis-Ferdinand Cline, Hermann Hesse, Peter Handke, and more. In 1982, PEN American Center created an award for translation in his name.