The Changeling

Haunting and strikingly idiosyncratic stories of childhood, disability, and rural prejudice from an Austrian writer rarely translated into English.

Christine Lavant was a giant of post-war Austrian literature whose fictions are on par with the best of Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard. Social outcasts, lonely children, and persecuted women are the subjects of Lavant’s stories, which mercilessly expose the rigid social stratification and exploitative, nearly feudal system that reigned in rural Austria in the early twentieth century, as well as the Catholic Church’s role in enforcing it.

The Changeling and Other Stories showcases six of Lavant’s extraordinary tales. In the titular story, Zitha, the disabled daughter of a cow-maid, is accused by the farmhand Lenz of being not a human child, but a changeling. In “The Purse-Snatcher,” a boy follows a marvellous, purse-bearing figure cloaked in white through the streets, convinced that it is the Christ child. And in “The Child,” Lavant draws on her experience getting treatment for her vision when she was young to create a hospital tale as claustrophobic as it is heart-rending.

Deeply mystical, ambivalently religious, with an acute focus on the natural world, Lavant’s fiction appears here in English for the first time in a remarkable translation by Tess Lewis.