Bøger af Markus Werner

Moritz Wenk is a moderately unsuccessful artist workng part-time as a commercial painter. He forms a harmonious if uncommitted couple with Judith, a dental hygienist. Cold Shoulder is a comic portrait of an unexceptional modern man struggling to make the decisions that will bring his life meaning.

When the cynical divorce lawyer Thomas Clarin finds himself at a table on the terrace of the Bellavista Hotel beside Thomas Loos, an eccentric, ageing philologist, they strike up an unlikely conversation. Soon Clarin's questions tease out stories from Loos' past, and as both men slowly reveal more of themselves.

Scrounged from his notebooks and hearsay, this is the story of a schoolteacher named Konrad Zundel: a philosopher, a wanna-be writer; scattered, self-conscious, glum, anxious, unlucky, discontent . . . At the end of his rope, he decides to flee his workaday life at all costs, only to find escape always a little beyond his reach. First his tooth falls out in the sight of other travelers, then he finds a severed finger in a restroom on a train. In fact, Zundel seems on the verge of falling to bits, as do his words, thoughts, wife, and world-will there be anything left, and anyone to hold the pieces? Zundel's Exit is a Chaplinesque comedy of disintegration, never knowing if it's coming or going.