The Children of the Dead (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

The magnum opus of 2004 Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek-a spectral journey through the catastrophic history embedded in the landscape of Austria “The surface of [Jelinek’s] prose cracks and bursts . . . fissured by phantasmagorical description, gallows humor, multilingual puns, and scouring sarcasm. . . . Jelinek’s novel is finally . . . a furious accumulation of lost moments and possible outcomes, an enormous, spectral kaleidoscope erected before the unfathomable.”-Dustin Illingworth, Washington Post The Alpenrose is a mountain resort nestled in Austria’s scenic landscape among historic churches and castles.It is a vacation idyll that attracts tourists from all over Europe.It is also a mass burial site. Amid the snow-topped peaks and panoramic vistas, ghosts haunt the forest: Edgar Gstranz, a young skier who died in a car crash; Gudrun Bichler, a philosophy student who committed suicide in her bathtub; and Karin Frenzel, a widow who (perhaps) died in a bus accident.As the three slip i