Zundel's Exit

Markus Werner was born in 1944 in Eschlikon, canton of Thurgau, Switzerland. Having written his dissertation on Max Frisch, Werner worked as a teacher in Schaffhausen before becoming a full-time writer in 1990. He is the author of seven novels, including On the Edge (2004), and has won numerous prizes. Michael Hofmann is an award-winning poet, critic, and translator from German. Among his translations are works by Thomas Bernhard, Ernst Junger, Franz Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen, Joseph Roth, and his father, Gert Hofmann.

Like Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, or Beckett's Murphy, or the high-pitched monodrama of the impasse we get in Buster Keaton, Z ndel's Exit gorges on the limit point of madness, of fidgeting hands and heads and hearts punished by the sclerosis of cramped conditions... Z ndel's Exit arrives in English... thirty years too late yet right on time. Nation