AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD MAN SITS AND LAUGHS

April 20
7 pm

Austrian Cultural Forum New York
11 E 52nd St, New York, NY 10022, United States

Please RSVP here

Join us and the Austrian author Philipp Weiss for a reading of his critically acclaimed book Am Weltenrand sitzen die Menschen und lachen | At the Edge of the World Man Sits and Laughs. The reading by the author is followed by a conversation with Barbara Kosta, professor and head of the Department of German Studies at University of Arizona.

About the book

1000 pages, five volumes – one novel. In At the Edge of the World Man Sits and Laughs, Philipp Weiss recounts the world’s transformation during the Anthropocene – that time in earth’s history in which the human being became the central power. Between France and Japan, from the 19th to the 21st century, this bold novel depicts a Panopticon of our fleeting reality. Each one of the five volumes has its own form: encyclopaedia, manga, novella, audio-transcription and notebook.

Seventeen-year-old Paulette experiences the 1871 Paris Commune, is one of the first European women to travel to Japan in the Meiji-era, lies frozen in the ice of the French Alps for over one hundred and thirty years. The climatologist Chantal, her great-great-granddaughter, follows her footsteps to the Far East, sketching a cynical story of the universe while escaping a love and its power. The artist Jona travels to Japan in search of his lover Chantal, but instead of finding her, he finds a multiple catastrophe: an earthquake, a wave, a nuclear accident. Nine-year-old Akio walks through destroyed territory for days. He finds comfort in Satoshi, a homeless day laborer who is cleaning up nuclear power stations and who is slowly dying from the effects of radiation. Driven by a phantom pain, the young Japanese woman Abra wanders through Tokyo and loses herself on her virtual journey through the city.