Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer

Ernst Weiss

ISBN 10: 0980033039 / ISBN 13: 9780980033038

Edité par Archipelago January 2010, 2010

A propos de cet article

used trade paperback edition. lightly shelfworn, corners perhaps slightly bumped. pages and binding are clean, straight and tight. there are no marks to the text or other serious flaws.

N° de réf. du vendeur 1258547

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer
• Éditeur: Archipelago January 2010
• Date de parution: 2010
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0980033039
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780980033038
• Reliure: Trade Paperback
• État de l'article: VG
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • lit / fiction

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

First published in 1931 and now appearing for the first time in English, Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is a disquieting anatomy of a deviant mind in the tradition of Crime and Punishment. Letham, the treacherously unreliable narrator, is a depraved bacteriologist whose murder of his wife is, characteristically, both instinctual and premeditated. Convicted and exiled, he attempts to atone for his crimes through science, conceiving of the book we are reading as an empirical report on himself—whose ultimate purpose may be to substitute for a conscience. Yet Letham can neither understand nor master himself. His crimes are crimes of passion, and his passions remain more or less untouched by his reason—in fact they are constantly intruding on his "report," rigorous as it is intended to be. Both feverish and chilling, Georg Letham explores the limits of reason and the tensions between objectivity and subjectivity. Moving from an unnamed Central European city to arctic ice floes to a tropical island prison, this layered novel—with its often grotesquely comic tone and arresting images—invites us into the darkest chambers of the human psyche.

À propos de l?auteur

Ernst Weiss, born in 1882 in Bruunn, Moravia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was a trained physician. His years as a ship’s doctor are apparent in much of the detail in Georg Letham. Weiss’ work emerges from an expressionist background but belongs with the modernist classics.

Joel Rotenberg translated Chess Story and The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s The Lord Chandos Letter for the New York Review Books Classics series.