MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Weighty meditation on the traumatic heart of darkness
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
The Weight of Things
by Marianne Fritz
(Verso, £9.99)
BEST-KNOWN for the cycle of novels called The Fortress, the late Austrian writer Marianne Fritz has been compared to James Joyce for an experimental style of writing which caused her proofreader to quit in exasperation at her intentional misspellings and deliberate grammatical violations.
There’s little such experimentation in evidence in her debut novel The Weight of Things, the first of her works to be translated into English by Adrian Nathan West. It is nonetheless concerned with the subject that was to dominate her books — understanding the disaster of Western civilisation.
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