The House

With The House Andreas Maier continues what he started with his hit novel Das Zimmer (The Room). One book, one house, one life, close up and then seen at an almost clinical distance but always filled with the child’s soul – and maybe with that which we have all long since forgotten, even though it’s where we all came from to begin with.

This life begins in autumn, the ducks swimming on the pond in a provincial town. The narrator is thinking back to a paradise, a life completely empty of people and obligations. The first three years of his life are spent with his great grandmother. But then they move into the big, new family home, built in the place where the apple trees used to be. The empty house becomes the centre of the boy’s world. Escaping from the harsh kitchen light and the family dinner, the boy discovers the lower regions, the cellar rooms with the boilers and storage tanks, which become his underground home. For a long time, the boy doesn’t utter a word or show any interest in engaging with his surroundings. His parents take him to see a series of doctors. Later on the cellar takes off into the sky like the Starship Enterprise, captained by his elder brother, while his sister, loud as the trumpets of Jericho, makes the walls of the house tremble.

»At first glance, Maier is an anti-modernist full of self-mockery, a hilarious master of exaggeration, but at second glance he turns out to be a metaphysically charged empiricist of the present« Hubert Spiegel, FAZ

»Someone who rages against his country as only one does who infinitely loves it.« FR

»Anyone interested in literature […] knows that Andreas Maier is one of the most remarkable German language authors.« Wiener Zeitung

»As diabolical and sublime as one can imagine.« Journal Frankfurt

»A name to remember.« FR

»The most talented blusterer among the younger generation of writers.« Die Zeit

»The expulsion from the paradise of early childhood which Andreas Maier […] describes could hardly be more drastic. Rarely has the experience of loss been told as compellingly from a child’s perspective.« FAZ

»Andreas Maier’s The House is a monumental, quiet book: a completely unsentimental memory etude, full of humour and profound sadness, written with a linguistic precision that is a marvel in and of itself. A little piece of great literature and a uniquely poetic type of local history, of which we will hopefully soon see the continuation.« NDR

»The House feels like the prologue to an immense and powerful panorama.« Die Welt

»The Room and The House are unique novels, written with the single-mindedness that is the stuff of great literature. The evocation of the spaces of childhood in which images of the world are born succeeds so completely, at a narrative and linguistic level, that one longs for the next instalments in the series, and happily places most of the other generation-spanning family epics currently flooding the publishing market to one side.« Rainer Moritz, NZZ

»Andreas Maier is an architect whose material is the past, and out of this fleeting material he has constructed a house with many different rooms, which one enters and is astonished at everything that is collected there.« Michael Opitz, Deutschlandradio Kultur

»A novel about inside and outside, about the self and the world. On a minute scale. A great book.« Jörg Magenau, taz

»Andreas Maier succeeds masterfully in productively transforming his sensibilities, his childhood traumas, his problems with the world as he was born into it and the world he was told it would be, in making them into literature.« Gerrit Bartels, Tagesspiegel

»With the development of an independent consciousness of his solitary existence in a world whose rules he does not understand, the narrator is later cast in the tragic role of an outsider. The way Maier is able to write his way into the mental landscape of his protagonist is a great achievement and makes one not a little curious to read the next volume in this Hessian family saga.« Dietmar Jacobsen, literaturkritik.de No. 3 (March 2012)

»Andreas Maier puts on a grandiose performance in the mental theatre of his early years.« NDR