Document Type
Commentary
Abstract
[First paragraph]
In Wach, published by Rowohlt Berlin Verlag (and as yet unpublished in English translation), a man named August Kreutzer, unable to sleep, drifts through the city whenever he is not at work. At first he walks in the evenings hoping thereby to get over his persistent insomnia. Along the way, he has to deal with a Doppelgänger who uses August's legal name to blog elaborate, almost baroque pornography online. Gradually, walking grows into its own proper cause for August Kreutzer's sleeplessness. The more he roams, the less he sleeps. He loses weight, eventually forgets to eat. August's hypnopompic state of mind even jeopardizes his job as an assistant manager at an upscale shopping mall-The Pleasure Center Palace-where replicas of all the seven major boulevards of the world have been made to converge for the enjoyment of shoppers seeking a flânerie protected from the vagaries of street life. Occasionally, and in keeping with his official job as assistant overseer and with his private pleasure as observer, August Kreutzer leans on the railing high above the Center's global intersection of famous streets to observe the shopping pedestrians below. The grandeur of the state-of-the-art mall and the bombastic rhetoric of his boss, a man named Xerxes, are at odds with those drabber parts of the city where August strolls in his off-hours, when his semi-conscious observations illuminate the spatial minutiae of his ever-changing surroundings.
Repository Citation
Flury, Angela. "Translator's Comments: Albrecht Selge "Losing Track"." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 14, no. 3, 2014, pp. 1–5. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol14/iss3/4