Dreaming Jack - Klaus Merz

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Biographie:
Klaus Merz was born in 1945 in Aarau and lives in Unterkulm, Switzerland. He has won many literary awards, including the Hermann Hesse Prize for Literature, the Swiss Schiller Foundation Poetry Prize and the Friedrich H?lderlin Prize in 2012. He has published over 40 works of poetry and fiction. His latest novel is The Argentinian (Der Argentinier, Haymon, 2009) and his recent collections of verse are Unexpected Development (Unerwarteter Verlauf, Haymon, 2013), Helios Hauls (Helios Transport, Haymon 2016), firm (firma, Haymon 2019) and In the House, Still Light (Noch Licht im Haus, Haymon, 2023). In 2024 Klaus Merz won the Grand Prix for Swiss Literature (Switzerland's highest literary prize)....

Sommaire:

Winner of Switzerland's Grand Prix Literatur 2024

In his short lyric novella, Dreaming Jack, Klaus Merz transports us into a family dynamic distilled like none other-the story of a Swiss bakers' family assuaging their torments and demons, all the while struggling with illness and mortality, with abandonment and absolution. With spare, poignant observations, Lukas Renz, Merz's young protagonist, propels us cinematically into his predestination-and with it, the death of almost an entire household. Still, each passing is heartfelt, each soul duly honored, each artifact gracefully embalmed and kept on display. Dreaming Jack is a work like no other: the distillation of a common-uncommon, a tragi-comic novella where both the micro- and macroscopic meet on the hem of Grandmother's winter coat, in the flutter of Mother's nightdress, in Father's contorted epileptic fits, or the cosmic pulsing of Brother Sol's continuously expanding head. An uncanny, Swiss coming-of-age story, exquisitely morphed into English by poet and translator Marc Vincenz.