Denmark (Rosenkilde & Bahnhof), Norway (Hovde & Brekke)
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: English world rights digital (Frisch & Co.), Spanish world rights (Adriana Hidalgo), Czech Republic (Archa), Macedonia (Goten)
Uncle J, the novel’s anti-hero, is not a character you readily identify with. Uncle J was a forceps delivery, which explains why he is not really all there. Still a child in many ways, he has grown older all the same, and has had to get by somehow.
Now he is thirty and is madly in love, with a Volkswagen Type 3 Variant, which he drives around between the yellow fields of rape. It is 1969, the year in which man first landed on the moon, while other men frequented the brothels around the railway station in Frankfurt am Main.
With brilliant irony, Andreas Maier describes Uncle J’s carefree detachment from the real world, his lack of a sense of history. The coordinates of a typical day in Uncle J’s life span his armchair enthusiasm for mountain climbing, his love of Wehrmacht tanks, and Frankfurt’s prostitutes. Uncle J suddenly becomes recognisable as a person to whom the concept of guilt, or guilt by connection, just does not apply, even in the most dubious of situations. He’s someone who doesn’t grasp at chances because he can’t, and meanwhile the world around him prepares for a hopeless future as if for salvation itself.
The Room is both memoir and novel, perhaps even the beginning of an epic family saga, a reflection on time and civilisation, on human dignity and how it can be preserved.
»Andreas Maier’s novel The Room is a reluctant declaration of love for a lifelong loser, a man who was abused by his fellow men as the archetypal failure and classic victim. It presents the mental history of a generation that enthusiastically embraced the moon landing and enforced motorisation and got fobbed off with depressing city by-pass roads instead.« Michael Braun, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
»The Room is a portrait of home that goes far beyond the usual memory writing and run-of-the-mill evocations of childhood. Maier takes the little details and particulars and develops an analysis of the history of West Germany, which is nevertheless resolutely narrative to the core.« Jörg Magenau, Tagesspiegel
»The subject matter is nothing less than the defence of provincial life, which in this case is also a defence of childhood. Andreas Maier celebrates the static world he comes from without false idealisation or idolisation.« Christopher Schmidt, Süddeutsche Zeitung
»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 […] This book is more than local history. It is also a history of the people and the presence, with the bizarre and charming character of Onkel J at its centre« Hubert Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Andreas Maier’s collection of columns Onkel J. Heimatkunde
»Someone who is enraged at his country the way you can only be if you infinitely love it.« Frankfurter Rundschau
»The Room is a novel about home, in which Maier sniffs out the rot in the idyll and reveals the lovelessness that holds it together. The fact that the reader nevertheless regrets the looming decline of this provincial town is a testament to the author’s consummate skill.« Der Spiegel
»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 a writer to be.« Journal Frankfurt
Germany in the early 1970s: a country full of fear of everything foreign. The only Italian at school seems like an alien being. In the 80s, it’s the Turkish people who are the first to put the tables outside the restaurants. As the people of Wetterau celebrate the first kebabs in the district as »resistance food«, Hitler, who had long since disappeared, begins to conquer the...
In the newest instalment of his book series Ortsumgehung, Andreas Maier takes us on a journey. He paints the picture of the past decades by reference to the cities and landscapes that flanked the tourist trails of a society obsessed with mobility.
There is the car trip with his parents to the hated holiday apartment in Brixen when he is seven, or hitchhiking to the south...
At the end of this novel, narrator Andreas is 28 years old, living in in Frankfurt am Main, studying, among other things, theories of truth. Andreas Maier tells the story of how stumbling blocks...
Goethe University Frankfurt. 1988, 1989. An entirely different degree back then: in short, nothing less than complete freedom. From drinking beer in the pub »Doctor Flotte« to seminars on truth theory (which see the philosophy students rushing to the doctor’s already mid-semester) a complete loss of self is just around the corner for our protagonist, while time too is getting turned on its...
A colourful, extremely personal combination of memory, research, and reflection turns into an approach towards the old-fashioned field of natural history. Based on walks in Wetterau and the Wendland, in South Tyrol and the Odenwald, Christiane Büchner and Andreas Maier map out their éducation naturelle. Their »treatise on the blessings of the spirit that the...
Andreas Maier’s The District is the latest volume of his insightful and illuminating book series Ortsumgehung. It deals with the exploration of life itself through the eyes of a prepubescent boy and his developing relationship with books, music and theatre and their interconnection with human existence. In the end he will comprehend the one true myth of art: Do...
Denmark (Batzer)
Denmark (Rosenkilde & Bahnhof)
Denmark (Rosenkilde & Bahnhof)
Russia (AST), Poland (ATUT)
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Spanish world rights (Adriana Hidalgo Editora), Netherlands (Ambo/Anthos)
English world rights (Open Letter), Russia (AST), France (Actes Sud)
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Spanish world rights (Tusquets), Italy (Aliberti)
Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Der Hörverlag)
Russia (AST), France (Métailié)
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Spanish world rights (Adriana Hidalgo), Slovenia (Litera), Domestic Rights Sales: German Book Club (Der Club Bertelsmann)