Fiction. Translated from the German by Roland Knappe. Unlike the famed movie The Third Man, Peter Rosei's portrait of post-World War II Vienna is a terrifying hell created by the very people who created it, continuing their activities after the war, a world akin to Heimito von Doderer's great novel The Demons.

Author Hometown: Vienna AST



About the author: Peter Rosei (born in Vienna in 1946) is an Austrian literary writer. He attended the University of Vienna, where he earned a doctorate in law in 1968. He worked for a time as the personal assistant to the Viennese painter Ernst Fuchs and then as the director of a publishing house for textbooks and nonfiction. Since 1972 he has been a freelance writer, publishing novels, stories, essays, poetry, plays, travelogues, and children's literature. He has traveled extensively and intensively throughout the world and has been a guest writer at Oberlin College, Bowling Green State University, and the University of New Mexico at Taos, as well as guest professor at the University of Nagoya, Japan. His literary breakthrough came with the novel Wer war Edgar Allan (Who was Edgar Allan) in 1977, which was filmed by the Austrian director Michael Haneke, with a screenplay by Rosei, in 1984. His fictional texts portray the limits of knowledge and the discrepancies between thought and action in Western society. Rosei's prolific output includes the novels Die Milchstrasse (The Milky Way, 1981), Rebus (1990), and Persona (1995), as well as a six-part novel cycle titled Das 15.000-Seelen-Projekt (The 15,000 Souls Project) from 1984-1988. In 2005 he published a panoramic novel of Vienna during the postwar period, Wien Metropolis (METROPOLIS VIENNA).