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ISBN 978-0-9800330-3-8
SHORTLISTED FOR THREE PERCENT'S 2011 BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD!
First published in 1931 and now appearing for the first time in English, Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is a disquieting anatomy of a deviant mind in the tradition of Crime and Punishment. Letham, the treacherously unreliable narrator, is a depraved bacteriologist whose murder of his wife is, characteristically, both instinctual and premeditated. Convicted and exiled, he attempts to atone for his crimes through science, conceiving of the book we are reading as an empirical report on himself – whose ultimate purpose may be to substitute for a conscience. Yet Letham can neither understand nor master himself. His crimes are crimes of passion, and his passions remain more or less untouched by his reason – in fact they are constantly intruding on his “report,” rigorous as it is intended to be. Both feverish and chilling, Georg Letham explores the limits of reason and the tensions between objectivity and subjectivity. Moving from an unnamed Central European city to arctic ice floes to a tropical-island prison, this layered novel – with its often grotesquely comic tone and arresting images – invites us into the darkest chambers of the human psyche.
If one could write a book about the internal feelings of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, or any other man who brings nightmares to life – this would be it.
"—Zahar Laor, ManofLaBook.com
Vivid. . . . [With] the thrill of intellectual obsession. . . . Weiss's novels are remarkable for their ambitious conceits, stylistic variation, and unusual characters. . . . He uncovers the fear, apathy, longing and rage for which the now clichéd psychoanalytic terms were invented. . . . His finest moments as a writer are when he plays the strict psychoanalyst, allowing his disturbed characters to speak their minds while he suspends judgment of right and wrong.
"—The Nation
Disinctive and vivid. . . . A remarkable, haunting work. [Weiss is] an extraordinary writer indeed. . . . There's more than a hint of Dostoevsky to the book. . . . Joel Rotenberg has done a fine job of rendering Weiss's snappily sardonic prose.
"—The Lancet Infectious Diseases
Part medical detective story and part criminal confession. . . . the story addresses . . . justice, punishment, altruism, the fear of illness, the joy of recovery, the ecstasy of being alive, and the absolute worth of a single human life. . . . From a literary standpoint, readers can expect a sizeable reward.
"—Journal of the American Medical Association
One of his strongest works. . . . One admires Weiss's skill at creating such a complex relationship between a subjective narrator who thinks he's objective and the reader who bears witness to it.
"—The Quarterly Conversation
What an extraordinary writer he is!
"—Franz Kafka
Weiss . . . took soul-searching to its darkest depths. He is remarkably open . . . searching and piercing.
"—The Complete Review
What makes Georg Letham so fascinating is not that he is a murderer, but that he knows this and is still plagued with a compulsion to contribute to humanity . . . He kills for money, but when stripped of the need for money and forced to live, he becomes more of a human being.
"—Salonica
I wonder why Weiss isn’t better known here. A doctor as well as a writer, he knew about the body as well as the heart, and you can trust him when he describes how each can act on the other.
"—Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
Ernst Weiss is in fact one of the few writers who may justly be compared to Franz Kafka . . . This is easily one of the most interesting books I have come across in years . . . One is filled with impressions, stimulated, gripped by images, characters, and episodes that are strangely real but also unforgettably fashioned. And, incidentally, it's all very Austrian.
"—Thomas Mann
2 Reader comments
Ernst Letham
I read this last month--thanks for sending a review copy to us at Sycamore Review!--and greatly enjoyed it. My review of the novel can be found on our weblog: www.sycamorereview.com Will there be more Ernst Weiss novels coming down the pike?Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer
I am interested in novels that have a human connection, both socially and psychologically. I look forward to reading this novel in hopes of uncovering an author who I can relate to on this level.