Leavetaking

Description

Leavetaking is the story of an upper-middle-class childhood and adolescence in Berlin between the wars. In the course of the novel, Weiss plumbs the depths of family life: there is the early death of his beloved sister Margot, the difficult relationship with his parents and the fantasies of adolescence and youth. All of this is set in the midst of an increasing anti-Semitism, which forces the Weiss family to move again and again, a tenuous existence that only intensifies the narrator's growing restlessness.

PETER WEISS was a German writer, painter, graphic artist, and experimental filmmaker. He is best known for his plays "Marat/Sade" and "The Investigation," as well as the monumental three-volume historical novel The Aesthetics of Resistance. Born in Germany in 1916 to a Christian mother and a Jewish father, he began his career as visual artist, studying at the Prague Art Academy in the late '30s. After the German occupation of the Sudetenland, his family moved to Sweden, where Weiss would spend the rest of his life, eventually becoming a Swedish citizen. His work won many major German literary awards, including the Buchner and Mann Prizes, and Peter Brook's production of "Marat/Sade" received the Tony Award for Best Play. Weiss died in 1982. CHRISTOPHER LEVENSON is a prominent Canadian poet. He was the co-founder of Arc Magazine and of the Harbinger Poets imprint of Carleton University Press.

"This is the most under-covered, undervalued release of 2014." -Flavorwire, 50 Best Independent Fiction and Poetry Books of 2014 "[Weiss] remains among the most important postwar German authors no one's read." -Slate, Overlooked Books of 2014 "A moving testimonial to a young man's strivings for personal freedom... This poetically concise yet propulsive work...paints a portrait of a young artist in his state of becoming." -3:AM Magazine "One of the finest, strangest coming-of-age novels you've never heard of." -Barnes & Noble Review "A remarkable writer... must be counted among the most important European authors of the 20th century." -The Complete Review "A dynamic work, a re-creation and exorcism of the past rather than a recollection of it in tranquility...Wholly succeeds in fusing a new realism with a new imaginative vision." -Times Literary Supplement