The Weight of Things

It’s 1945. A dull, heavy fog lies above the city of Donaublau, where a pregnant Berta awaits her fiancé’s return from the front. But instead of Rudolf, his friend Wilhelm enters the room and delivers the news of Rudolf’s death to Berta, whose reply is but a »well, well«. She marries the returning soldier instead, a »worthy representative of his nation«, driver and footboy, and has a second child with him, jealously eyed by her friend Wilhelmine. But increasingly, life seems like a bad dream to Berta, the weight of things pushes everyone down, especially the little and very little people, maimed and at a loss for words, until Berta sees no way out and suffocates her children in their sleep in a desperate attempt to remove them from the grasp of their environment. Only in a psychiatric institution does she find protection from the »wound that is life«.

»Marianne Fritz was a genius«, writes Marlene Streeruwitz after the death of the Austrian writer. In her prize-winning debut novel published in 1978, she looks with great compassion and brilliant humour at the silently smiling Wilhelm, the calculating Wilhelmine – and at Berta, a petit-bourgeois Medea, who rebels against the narrowness and the corrosive power of the post-war world order with a quiet, destructive force. A bold, masterful, shocking book.

»Written in a brisk tone that disguises its destination, this slow-burning horror story steps quietly and methodically into a heart of familiar darkness … The war haunts this novel, adding to the weight of everyday things and everyday evils that Fritz so ingeniously dissects.« The New York Times

»A harrowing book about the horrors of motherhood, jealousy, and war trauma.« Kirkus Reviews

»A tightly wrought masterwork of narrative, a little gem.« Los Angeles Review of Books

»Fritz [creates] intensity through condensation in her debut. Told anachronously, it is characterised by a will to form that is pleasantly striking in times when content and autofictional authenticity are fetishised.« Kathrin Witter, Welt am Sonntag

»In her seclusion, Fritz ruthlessly defied all norms, conventions and agreements of the genre ›novel‹ in order to deliver a breathtaking alternative to the fiction of other writers. A literarily radical work as a contradiction to social and political injustice.« Uwe Schütte, der Freitag

»It is fascinating with how much precision and sensitivity the author describes a world of outsiders in which there is, nevertheless, no place for those who come from broken families.« Karin Cerny, WOZ Die Wochenzeitung