The Fabric of Night
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
By one of the most promising novelists in Germany today, The Fabric of Night is a frightening, profound reflection on the nature of illusion and reality.Albin Kranz is a sculptor, haunted by hallucinations and by painful memories of his childhood. At her wit’s end, Livia, a photographer with whom he has lived for five years, suggests that they go to Istanbul to give there love one last chance. There, he witnesses a murder. But like one of Hitchcock’s desperately misunderstood characters, Albin can’t persuade anyone of what he saw, nor find any proof. His quest for truth takes him into the slums of the city and deep into the mysterious, exotic Eastern culture few Western visitors ever penetrate. The Fabric of Night is a psychological drama, a nightmare, and a double tale of disintegrating love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of Peters's challenging second novel, his first to be published in English, 28-year-old sculptor Albin Kranz is relaxing on the terrace of his Istanbul hotel when he witnesses the murder of an American "who looked like Marlon Brando in old age" at an adjacent hotel. But neither his wife, Livia, nor the group of German art students the couple meet in Turkey, nor the clerk at the victim's hotel believes him, because Kranz is alcoholic, his brain in a feverish, nightmarish state. His first-person narrative is a stream of memories, fears and delusions ("I've become part of an alien organism"). Kranz's musings are interspersed with the almost equally opaque commentary of one of the art students. This ambitious book contains some striking bits of Turkish cultural travelogue and the kind of intensity one might expect from young artist intellectuals, but the oblique storytelling makes it a tough read.
