Copied from r/truelit

I just finished Marianne Fritz's The Weight of Things yesterday.

In short, it's the best novel I've read that doesn't regularly get featured on top 100 lists (including our own).

First, a brief biography of Fritz offers some insight. She published four novels: the 3,000 page Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst (Whose language you don’t understand); the 8,000 page Die Festung (The Fortress), which had another 2,000 pages she aimed to complete before her untimely death in 2015; an installment in the aforementioned The Fortress; and, of course, The Weight of Things.

It's 120 pages.

On one hand you have a project dwarfing Zettels Traum and À la recherche du temps perdu, on the other a slim volume comparable to The Great Gatsby or Alice in Wonderland.

If you’d like an idea of her style in the doorstoppers, her website is representative. Click on a random page in the second half and the experimentation leaves House of Leaves in the dust. Unfortunately, only The Weight of Things has been translated into English.

When an author of tomes publishes a featherweight, one expects the most calculated, condensed piece possible, which it is.

Above all, though, it is bleak.

It’s a woman’s struggle with loneliness and mental illness. You can tell it’s a tale of hopelessness—despite it beginning with lightheartedness—from the get-go but the weight begins to accumulate in a manner simultaneously predictable and surprising. It’s like a meandering train. You don’t know every station along the route or who gets on and off but you know the last stop, the climax of the journey, will be utter depression.

It’s about motherhood and the remnants of the Holocaust in post-war Austria. It has some puns and experimentation, but the crux rests on a head-hopping stream-of-consciousness-esque style—the type where dreams and reality merge. I cannot recommend it enough.

Weight of Things

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The weight of things (2015)

The weight of things (2015)

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