septembre 2000

Walter Grond:                 languages: german french

"Old Danube House"

Novel about a modern identity crisis

Translation: Janice Schützenhöfer
A Viennese professor Johan Nichol- expert for quantum computers at the Technical University of Vienna- leads a conventional academic- middle class life with a young attractive wife and no children. Over the internet he becomes aware of the strange Bosnian "guru" Sahli. Sahli claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine and wanted to derive a type of world religion around it. At first the remarkable suicide of this outsider catches Nichols` interest on the fronge elements of science and beyond. Skeptical and scientifically sober but with an ever increasing fascination with this contrast of unproven scientific theories, he begins to take the questionable and seemingly laughable serieously. Slowely but consistantly he distances himself from his until now unnoteworthy environment and turns his attention more to a young computer science student who displays all the typical characteristics of the technology obsessed generation. The computer presents itself as an alterego for the student Hofer- he despises Microsoft and swears by Linux, knows his way around the internet including all its dirty corners and keeps up with the cryptic and yet "cool" jargon of the web- youth.

Nichol, who at first sees Hofer as an "enfant terrible", studies him from his precarious position in an attempt to understand this generation. He follows him to happening techno parties in delapidated factory buildings, gets to know the pungent underground and finally allows himself to be led by a woman who has fallen in with the esoteric to her "roots" in Egypt. His journey takes him to the bosnian home of the eccentric Sahni where he searches for his relatives and roots.

Old_Danube_House.jpg (4124 Byte)
Buchumschlag

From now on the book mutates into an engaging reportage from a devastated country that still has a transendental undertone. Even when he meets up with a distant relative of Sahni, he feels himself to be unexplainabley distanced from actual events. Like Leopold Bloom, he stumbles through a world full of associations but without explainations. The burning question from a Hemingway novel- how should a man live his life- imposes itself stronger than ever due to the traumatic Bosnian relationships and the apathetic population.

           

ISBN 3-85218-335-9   Haymon-Verlag, Innsbruck,  280 pages.