Rainald Goetz, born in 1954 in Munich, studied History and Medicine in Munich and obtained a doctoral degree in both subjects. He briefly worked as a doctor, but quit this profession for the sake of literature in his early thirties. His first novel, Insane, was published in 1983. In 1998, Goetz wrote the internet diary 'Rubbish for Everyone', probably the first literary blog in Germany, with entries on the world of media and consumerism. It was published in book form in 1999 and together with Rave, Jeff Koons, Celebration and Deconspiration belongs to This Morning, his great history of the present. Goetz has been awarded numerous prizes, most notably the Georg Buchner Prize in 2015. He lives in Berlin.
'Adrian Nathan West has managed an impressive translation of Mr
Goetz's voice - a relentless staccato that can border on the manic
... This language accounts for a lot of what makes the book stick
in the mind.... [Goetz's] eloquent depictions of human misery, and
his frustration with the seemingly impossible task of helping those
who appear beyond help, continue to resonate.' - The Economist
'Through radical shifts in narrators, subjects and references to
culture, Goetz creates a post modern montage, a shattered book
mapping a shattered soul. The novel has now been translated into
English for the first time in an extraordinary rendering by Adrian
Nathan West, and while the sampling and snippeting might seem old
hat to us today, Goetz's book has a profound advantage over
contemporary novels of this style: a painful and beautiful, at
times vindicating and always truly felt lyricism that shines a
light into the grey cosmos of Raspe's mind...' - Jan Wilm, Times
Literary Supplement
'Foucault stalks the novel's corridors, informing the reflections
on control and normativity, the construction of treatment as
carceral, punitive, ultimately unavailing.... If Goetz's experience
can teach us anything, even a generation on, it is to query
psychiatry's apparent resignation at its own failures.' - Literary
Review
'Originally published in Germany in 1983, Goetz's bold,
uncompromising novel retains its serrated edges in this spirited
English translation by West. [R]eaders ... will find brilliant,
treasurable moments of clarity amongst all the detritus of the
mind.' - Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
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