Val di Non

Can you imagine a mountain without its corresponding valley? If you can imagine both God and the world, can you manage to imagine, for example, God without the world? That which hovers before your mind’s eye, from A to Z, often appears more real than what’s confusingly in front of you.

One can take an extraordinary hike through Oswald Egger’s Val di Non or simply go for a walk. A richly illustrated book with innumerable doors, idiosyncrasies, and points that lead you to stumble into an incredible imaginary landscape of the marvelous: what it will be like to have lived without having been.   

»Oswald Egger moves comfortably between literature and the sciences, visual art and sound art.« Süddeutsche Zeitung

»With Val di Non Egger sets off on the search for the absolute void as a means of purification on the way to poetic enlightenment ... and thereby carries on his distinctive poetical programme with convincing consistency.« Deutschlandfunk

»Val di Non is a refined book of rejection, a topographical experiment with sight. Wandering through a landscape we are pulled into the massive rock face of words and into a literary botany, which can be even more real and detailed than reality itself.« Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»Egger is a magician of the word.« Peter Pisa, Kurier

»In eloquent and detailed language Oswald Egger creates a landscape which at times seems even more real than reality itself.« ORF

»[Val di Non] is perhaps Egger’s most beautiful book yet, certainly the most personal.« ORF Ö1

»Egger’s stunning language on the one hand takes hold of describable nature in a very precise way, and on the other liquefies it in his current of archaic words. Great poetry for unnatural times.« Wiener Zeitung