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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2021
GABRIELE PETRICEK, an Austrian author residing in Vienna and a member of the Literaturkreis Schloß Neulengbach Podium, has to date published over forty short prose texts and poems in numerous anthologies as well as four books: Zimmerfluchten (Suites of Rooms, 2005), Von den Himmeln: Triptychon (2009, Out of the Skies: Triptych, 2018), Joyce's Choice oder: Ein Hund kam in die Küche (Joyce's Choice or: A Dog Came into the Kitchen, 2010), and Die Unerreichbarkeit von Innsbruck: Verfolgungsrituale (The Unattainability of Innsbruck: Rituals of Pursuit, 2018). In her first collection, Zimmerfluchten, Petricek presents seven narratives that can each stand alone, but they are all connected in various ways, and not only by means of the book's title. The first and the last stories take place in apartments, the others transpire outdoors; they are chance encounters with people who seem not always wholly grounded. Her second book, Von den Himmeln: Triptychon, consists of three separate narratives that together constitute a whole. The stories are about people who do not seek love but whose lives are infiltrated by it, insidiously rather than benevolently, which leads to unintentional consequences. The central theme that connects the three stories is the question of the relationship between life and art, and also of the strategies that bring art into life and life into art. In Petricek's triptych, the connection shows up not in the middle but off-center in the third story.
Contrary to Petricek's substantial first two books, Joyce's Choice oder: Ein Hund kam in die Küche is an artistic limited-edition and pamphletlike publication that includes small illustrations and aphorisms, black-andwhite photographs and colorful cartoons, copies of restaurant receipts, and a calendar page. The first-person narrator, who is a member of the Freitagmittagsgesellschaft (Friday Noon Society), ruminates about the festive dinner that the group holds annually in honor of Leopold Bloom, the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). In addition to heavy eating and drinking, each member of the society contributes “brain food” drawn from Bloom's world.
Die Unerreichbarkeit von Innsbruck: Verfolgungsrituale is about the art of writing and what it means to the first-person narrator to be a writer today.
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