This book is intended as a persuasion to read. Reading perceived as a creative activity such as playing a musical score. One learns to see, think, perceive and comprehend in the same way as one learns to read.
With these words Dieter Wellershoff sets forth his underlying reasons for compiling “Der Roman und die Erfahrbarkeit der Welt”. Originally published in 1988 and now reprinted, this immensely authoritative and beautifully written work showcases the outstanding novels of world literature. Beginning with Cervantes, this excursive survey goes on to explore Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, followed by Kafka, Joyce, Thomas Mann and many others, before concluding with Beckett and Pynchon.
In his discussion of these novelists and their oeuvre, Dieter Wellershoff highlights the rich variety of forms devised by these authors in their endeavours to formulate their image of life. With great perspicacity and unerring powers of observation, Dieter Wellershoff seeks to fathom their motivation for writing and the individual and historical conditions surrounding the genesis of their works. By examining their themes and structures, he is able to compile a history of the novel’s form and content which demonstrates “what a significant chapter in the history of human consciousness and perception of the world” is expressed in these great and innovative novels.
“Wellershoff’´s love of the written word reveals three things; not only a pleasure in reading and in writing - erudition therefore, and talent - but above all, a curiosity for the ever-elusive relationship between the two.” (Die Zeit)
