Arno Geiger

Arno Geiger’s Der alte König in seinem Exil is a tactful, delicate and fabulously simple book, a monument to a living man. It stands in a line of the major farewell books of German-language literature that includes Peter Weiss' Abschied von den Eltern (1961) and Peter Handke’s Wunschloses Unglück (1972), although those works are tributes to the dead. Another difference between Geiger on the one hand and Weiss and Handke on the other is that Geiger’s book does not present itself as a “story”. It does without fiction and tells of the father’s life and how it is being slowly extinguished by one of the most common illnesses of our time. The painful thing about it is that the sick man knows that he has Alzheimer’s disease and that there is no cure for it. What is comforting, though, is that the father is a good loser, and that he realises in time “that even a person who gives up can win.” He withdraws to his fading kingdom and rules there according to his needs. In his dementia, he does not recognise his son anymore. He just wants to “go home” – although he is a man who had hardly been away for decades.

Franz Haas: „Monument für einen Lebenden“
© Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 9 February 2011