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For the fifth time, the Austrian Book Prize was awarded without ceremony due to the coronavirus pandemic. It goes for “Stories with Marianne” by Xaver Bayer. The novel was published by Salzburger Jung und Jung Verlag.
Xaver Bayer currently spends his life in the country. That’s where he retired to write. And it was there that the Viennese, born in 1977, received the news that this year he was going to receive the Austrian Book Prize. “I was not expecting it at all. I fell out of nowhere and am even happier,” Bayer said in a first reaction to the Austrian press agency on Monday.
Book award: a Viennese author and a publisher from Salzburg can celebrate
Bayer is honored for his novel “Stories with Marianne”, which was published by Salzburger Jung und Jung Verlag.
Xaver Bayer, who studied German Philosophy and German Language and Literature, has been with the publisher since its first program in 2001. “It was about time this special author was awarded such an award,” said Anna Jung of Jung und Jung Verlag in one first reply by mail.
Since 2001, Jung and Jung have produced twelve Bayer books: novels, short stories, poems, and a play. And finally, “Stories with Marianne”.
“All these ‘stories with Marianne’ begin quite everyday and relaxed, they begin with the washing or with a boring afternoon when Marianne invites the narrator to take a field trip,” said the reasoning of the jury published this Monday. But the more harmless the beginning, “the more cruel and grotesque is the later course.”
“The book is a hybrid, the stories always have the same protagonist, and that’s why it’s always a bit related. That’s why it reads a bit like a novel and maybe easier for people. Unfortunately, the short stories aren’t really so popular. ” says Bayer.
He starts each story again and creates a panorama of his great city, in which Marianne and her companion are lost. It’s funny, sometimes melancholic, but as you read it, it can apparently drag you into an endless abyss in which the last remnants of a functioning society seem to rot. The fact that Marianne and the narrator watched an assassination attempt from their window in the middle of the city – or even mixed them up, because she was dead in the end – after the terrorist attacks in Vienna, one in particular had goose bumps in the back. “Literary modernity is invoked in these stories and is confidently used in different genres, from horror stories to fantasy scenes,” the jury said of their decision.
Bayer illuminates the halls of fear of our time, because again and again its hero plunges into chaos. In short: “A brilliant and multifaceted reflection on our time.” So far there have been three editions of the book. A few more will follow. Bayer will celebrate alone. So he will open the sparkling wine in the evening “just for me and toast in all directions,” he tells the APA.
It is the second time that the Austrian Book Prize has been awarded to a work by the Salzburg publisher. In 2018 Daniel Wisser was awarded as “Queen of the Mountains”.
Debut award goes to Leander Fischer
There were two other Salzburg-related candidates on the shortlist. Von Jung und Jung was nominated for a second novel with Helena Adler’s “The Infanta Carries Her Head to the Left”. Lives in Oberndorf. Karin Peschka was nominated by Otto Müller Verlag for “Clean, dance, laugh.” Also, there were Monika Helfer (“Die Bagage”) and Cornelia Travnicek with “Feenstaub”. A total of 117 titles were submitted by 31 publishers from Austria, 28 from Germany and two from Switzerland.
First prize goes to Leander Fischer for the 780-page novel “Die Forelle”. For an excerpt from this, the Upper Austrian native had already been awarded the Deutschlandfunk Prize in 2019 during the reading competition for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. In his monumental debut, he was “an extremely eloquent writer,” as the jury announced on Monday. “La Trucha” is “the exact opposite of the plain and unadorned prose” that dominates current narrative literature. Gunther Neumann (“Above Everything and Nothing”) and Mercedes Spannagel (“Das Palais muss burn”) were also nominated for the debut award.
