Pigeons on the Grass
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Wolfgang Koeppen’s postwar masterpiece in a luminous new translation by the poet Michael Hofmann
Pigeons on the Grass is told over a single day in Munich in 1948. The first new cinemas and insurance offices are opening atop the ruins, Korea and Persia are keeping the world in panic, planes rumble in the sky (but no one looks up), newspaper headlines announce war over oil and atomic bomb tests. Odysseus Cotton, a black man, alights at the station and hires a porter; Frau Behrend disowns her daughter; with their interracial love affair, Carla Behrend and Washington Price scandalize their neighbors—who still expect gifts of chocolate and coffee; a boy hustles to sell a stray dog; Mr. Edwin, a visiting poet, prepares for a reading; Philipp gives himself up to despair; Emilia sells the last of her jewelry; Alexander stars as the Archduke in a new German Super-production; and Susanne seeks out a night to remember. In Michael Hofmann’s words, “in their sum, they are the totality of existence.”
Koeppen spares no one and sees all in this penetrating and intense novel that surveys those who remain, and those who have just arrived, in a damaged society. As inventive as Joyce and as compulsively readable as Dickens, Pigeons on the Grass is a great lost classic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in Munich in 1948, German writer Koeppen's wrenching novel, first published in 1951, portrays a society coping with the aftermath of WWII. The panoramic narrative cuts back and forth across the intersecting lives and experiences of characters struggling to navigate "a lost world" with dignity and decorum, among them a failed writer and his heiress wife, who has been reduced to pawning her family heirlooms; a Black sergeant in America's occupying force and his German lover, who is carrying their child; a tour bus full of American schoolteachers; a psychiatrist who sells his blood for money; and a Black traveler from America and his elderly German porter. Koeppen (1906 1996) alternates between humor and tense drama in poetic passages and run-on sentences, and he endows his characters with classical attributes a character named Odysseus Cotton, a prostitute who sees herself as a Circe figure that conjure a sense of a shabby reality touched incongruously by myth. Hofmann's brilliant translation, meanwhile, finds pathos in the characters' quest for meaning and significance in a world of randomness and chance. Koeppen's masterwork soars.
