Online ZOOM Event
Cover: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Join us Thursday, February 25th, for an evening with Adrian Nathan West. Mr. West has recently translated two of Rainald Goetz's seminal novels, "Rave" and "Insane". Mr. West will be on hand to discuss his translations of one of Germany's most infamous living authors and engage in a discussion with Frankfurt novelist Jan Wilm.
About the Books
Translated for the first time into English, cult German author Rainald Goetz’s debut novel Insane draws upon his clinical psychiatric experience to paint a portrait of the asylum as a total institution. We follow a young psychiatrist, Dr Raspe, who enters the profession dreaming of revolutionizing its methods. Confronted by day-to-day practices and the reality of life in the psychiatric hospital, Raspe begins to fray at the edges. The very concept of madness is called into question in a brutal portrayal of patients and psychiatrists and the various treatments administered, from psychotherapy to electroshock therapy. What is madness? And who is truly mad? Diving headlong into a terrifying and oppressive world, Insane is a veritable journey into the madhouse by one of Germany’s most prominent and contentious authors.
In Rave, Goetz takes a headlong dive into nineties techno culture. From the cathartic release on the dance floor to the intense conversations in corners of nightclubs and the after-parties in the light of dawn, this exhilarating, fragmentary novel captures the feeling of debauchery from within.
the author
© alliance/dpa | B. von Jutrczenka
Rainald Goetz was born in 1954 in Munich, studied History and Medicine in Munich and obtained a doctoral degree in both subjects. He briefly worked as a doctor, but quit this profession for the sake of literature in his early thirties. His first novel, Insane, was published in 1983. In 1998, Goetz wrote the internet diary ‘Rubbish for Everyone’, probably the first literary blog in Germany, with entries on the world of media and consumerism. It was published in book form in 1999 and together with Rave, Jeff Koons, Celebration and Deconspiration belongs to This Morning, his great history of the present. Goetz has been awarded numerous prizes, most notably the Georg Büchner Prize in 2015. He lives in Berlin.
the Translator
© Adrian Nathan West
Adrian Nathan West is a writer, critic, and literary translator from the United States, now based in Spain. His most recent translations include Rainald Goetz’s RAVE and Sergi Pàmies’s THE ART OF WEARING A TRENCH COAT. His novel MY FATHER’S DIET will be published in the spring of 2021.
the Moderator
© Alexander Paul Englert
Jan Wilm was born in 1983 and studied English and American Studies at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. He has worked as a literary scholar at the Technical University Darmstadt, the Goethe University Frankfurt and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI). He is a writer, translator, and literary critic for publications such as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. In 2016 he published the book The Slow Philosophy of J. M. Coetzee and in 2019 the novel Winterjahrbuch (A Year of Winter). Wilm lives in Frankfurt am Main.
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