The Dry Danube: Novel: A Hitler Forgery - Hardcover

West, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081121432X ISBN 13: 9780811214322

Publisher: New Directions, 2000

Synopsis

The Dry Danube, Paul West's nineteenth novel, is a uniquely daring, dazzling, bravura performance by an acknowledged master. The Dry Danube, presents Hitler's "memoir" of the years he spent as a failed art student in Vienna, just before World War One. Each of the book's four parts is a solid raving block of barbaric flourishes, free of paragraphing in its headlong rush of disgorged spleen. "I wanted to get at H. before the violence sets in," West remarked: "But most of all I wanted to get the motion of his mind, as seen by another." Hitler spews his rage over his blighted career and his desperate wooing of Treischnitt and Kolberhoff, "proud famous painters both." These "two men so important in my young life, yet so aloof from me," he tries to befriend, though "I would have had more success groveling before a statue of Frederick the Great or Charlemagne." ("These men do not so much control Art, they are Art. It makes you sick to think of it.") A risky venture, The Dry Danube stands a triumph -- baroque, chilling ("This was not the last the world would hear of me"), and scathingly humorous at the same instant.

About this title

About the Author

Paul West was born in 1930 in England, and educated at Oxford and Columbia Universities. Besides 18 novels he is also the author of ten works of non-fiction. He has taught at Brown, Cornell, and Arizona. His honors include a 1993 Lannan Prize for Fiction, an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1996 the French government made him a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. He moved to the US in 1957, and presently resides in Ithaca, New York.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 081121432X
• ISBN 13: 9780811214322
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 160