The Great Bagarozy (Dedalus Europe 1998 S) - Softcover

Helmut Krausser

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1873982046 ISBN 13: 9781873982044

Publisher: Dedalus Limited, 1999

Synopsis

Cora Dulz is a psychiatrist, married and in her mid-thirties, with a husband, a tax consultant, uninterested in anything except cutting articles about unusual deaths out of the newspapers. Professionally Cora's life has reached a state of crisis. Two of her patients have recently committed suicide. Now she has a new patient: Stanislaus Nagy, a young man who is obsessed with the dead opera singer Maria Callas and claims she appears to him in visions. Contrary to professional etiquette she meets him outside the consulting room and falls in love with him. Nagy refuses to have an affair with her. He claims to be the Devil and to have inhabited Callas's black poodle. He disappears, only to be found by Cora performing in a variety theatre as a magician under the name of the Great Bagarozy.
Helmut Krausser blends reality, fantasy and the supernatural in very bizarre and unusual ending.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Mitchell is associate professor at the School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University. His research focuses on democratization in Latin America and the politics of ethnic minorities.

POUSSIN ET MOISE 2

Mike Mitchell is a well-regarded translator from German with a special interest in Austrian literature. He previously taught German at Stirling University. His translations for Dedalus include five novels by Gustav Meyrink, among others. His translation of Herbert Rosendorfer's Letters Back to Ancient China won the Shlegal-Tieck German Translation Prize. He lives in Scotland.

From Kirkus Reviews

The cultures of psychiatry and celebrity worship are memorably skewered in this ingenious fantasy of satanic possession and perhaps delusion, a 1997 novel by a prizewinning and critically acclaimed German writer now making his American debut. In a city that's probably Berlin, fortyish Cora Dulz maintains a middlingly successful psychiatric practice (two of her patients have recently committed suicide) and a placid relationship with her husband Robert, a tax consultant in whom all passion seems, not just spent, but obliterated and long forgotten. In fact, Robert has his passion: a collection of ``stories about strange deaths,'' culled from newspapers and magazines, from which Krausser frequently offers hilarious comic-horrible examples. Cora's own life takes a revivifying turn when a mysteriously attractive new patient, Stanislaus Nagy, recounts his obsession with the late soprano Maria Callas, provoking in Cora a sexual attraction he seems uninterested in reciprocating. Following a few sessions (the story is divided into the ``Weeks'' of his therapy) and a bizarre after-hours adventure together, he confesses that he's actually ``the Devil,'' while rambling on in ardent detail about Callas's ignoble beginnings, spectacular career, and ruinous relationship with billionaire Aristotle Onassis (not a bad demonic figure himself)and explaining his infatuation (``She was a synthesis of all the arts, freed of all imperfections . . . I had to share in it!''). Krausser's plotline juxtaposes Cora's deliriously exfoliating, oddly mingled professionalism, skepticism, lust, and moral confusion against the ``progress'' of Nagy's campaign to become human (by assuming such burdens as a job: as the magician Bagarozy), and thus eventually be ``Dead and with Maria.'' It all climaxes with a wonderful renunciation scene (being human, it seems, isn't all that attractive) and a smashing conclusion that ironically fulfills Cora's, ``the Devil's,'' and even Robert''s expectations and fantasies alike. A brilliant work. Let's have more of Krausser's fiction, please. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dedalus Limited
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1873982046
• ISBN 13: 9781873982044
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 153