Chinese Whispers
Prose Pieces
Published by Diogenes as Stille Post
Original Title: Stille Post
›Chinese Whispers‹ is the name of a children's game, played here with a literary text: It travels around the world and through six languages, and is compared with its original message at the end, with astonishing results. Ten prose pieces: A dream journey that is so suggestive you feel like you are there. A game played with creation myths. A first person narrator who voices the monstrous. An internal monologue between a man as his young and old self about the state of the world and his own personal stories. Legendary tales about gossipy old aunts and places where the author has been or wants to go to. About a century full of mortal agony. About encounters of longing at inopportune moments. And a book of nightmares about what people do to one another. Prose texts, poèmes en prose, poetic, mad, funny, dark, obsessive, yet always told with effortless ease by the inimitable voice of Urs Widmer.
Contemporary Literature
176 pages
2011

978-3-257-06790-3
Urs
Widmer

Urs Widmer (1938–2014) was born in Basel. He studied German, Romance languages and History in Basel, Montpellier and Paris. After finishing his PhD, he worked as an editor for the German Suhrkamp Verlag before he and other editors founded the Verlag der Autoren. In 2007 he was awarded the ›Friedrich-Holderlin-Preis‹ of the town of Bad Homburg for his collected works.

Photo: © Isolde Ohlbaum

Quotes

SonntagsZeitung, Zurich
»Urs Widmer's books keep our dreams alive.«
Tages-Anzeiger, Zurich
»Urs Widmer's new book is a collection of short prose pieces. They are magnificent. We are caught up in Widmer's language.«