An Evocation of Matthias Stimmberg

Translated by Sarah Pollack / August 2021 / 4.5 x 7, 56 pp. / 978-1-939663-73-3

“Misanthropy is a kind of humanism;
humanism is also a kind of misanthropy.” —Matthias Stimmberg

A miniature portrait in misanthropy and an oblique account of the trauma that was the twentieth century, An Evocation of Matthias Stimmberg is a Borgesian account of an Austrian writer who despises both the world he lives in and the work he himself has produced. In a sequence of anecdotes imbued with haughty melancholy and nihilistic irony, Alain-Paul Mallard assembles a puzzle of a man whose fragmented life crosses paths with fictional and non-fictional protagonists from Hans Magnus Enzensberger to Paul Celan, and whose concise first-person reflections describe a complicated and sympathetic monster.

A masterpiece of the miniature in the tradition of Robert Walser and Fleur Jaeggy and a tribute to the legacy of Thomas Bernhard, Mallard’s “imaginary life” offers a celebration of sterility and silence in its appropriately distilled essence.

Writer and filmmaker Alain-Paul Mallard was born in 1970 and raised in Mexico City. He studied Hispanic literature in his native city, and then studied European intellectual history in Toronto. Tempted by silence, he is the author of a short, highly concentrated body of work. His films include L’origine de la tendresse, Évidences, and L’adoption.

Press

“[A] curious—in all senses of the word—and, yes, evocative little work.”
—M. A. Orthofer, The Complete Review