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Jurg Laederach
69 Ways to Play the Blues
| The phone refuses
to ring. I sit here on 82nd Street; no, on 83rd ; no, on
81st ; I forget where I am. The phone refuses to ring,
to tear me out of this enforced solitude, which I know
only too well. This solitude that makes me sick and stirs
me to tears, but surely not tears of compassion. A call
is bound to come any minute now up from the Village and
afford me the company I desperately desire. The phone isn't
ringing. The bell doesn't work. |
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| Written after the Swiss writer Jurg Laederach's
third trip to New York in the late 1980s, 69
Ways was hailed by award-winning author Walter
Abish as a text predictive of "a Europe to come, when borders
dissolve." Like Alain-Robbe Grillet, Georges Perec, and the
great Oulipo writers, Laederach constructs seamless narratives
based on sly compositional strategies. The reader is only
somewhat aware of the rules of the game. Transposed to America,
Laederach's texts, Abish argues, "function as a scanning
device. Characters vanish, reappear. There is something relentless.
Everything is transitory. No sentimentality. No clinging
to the past. Everything is on the verge of being discarded.
Everything is on the verge of dissolution. Everything resonates
with imminent change." |
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