 Best Radio Play 2007 (SWR production)
Friedrich Hölderlin Award
|  | Ror Wolf – Raoul Tranchirer's Observations on Silence
fiction
140pp (8,200 words), with numerous illustrations
» About the author English sample translation (pdf)
RAOUL TRANCHIRERS BEMERKUNGEN ÜBER DIE STILLE is the keystone to the comprehensive Encyclopedia for Intrepid Readers, a lexicon comprising purely of literature: it brings the reader to his or her senses, a radical examination of the world.
An indispensable book for all lovers of the unconventional elements of literature, complemented by the unmistakable collages of the author who has long-since enjoyed cult status in Germany.
The radio adaptation of RAOUL TRANCHIRERS BEMERKUNGEN ÜBER DIE STILLE was voted »Best Radio Play« by the Deutsche Akademie der Darstellenden Künste.
»The texts of Ror Wolf stand without comparison. He is capable of revealing the comical, the absurd element, the abysmal behind our everyday. His work stands as living proof that ‚serious’ literature may also be hilarious and entertaining.«
Horst Köhler, former Federal President of Germany
»What would the world be without Ror Wolf (…) Wolf’s worlds are often as unsettling as those collages Max Ernst assembled from elements at once familiar, arbitrary and terrifying. That not only applies to Wolf’s own collages which resemble them, and which he has been producing for a long time as a relaxation from writing, but also to his texts. Rarely has the puzzling been so entertaining…«
Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung
»Sometimes the whole universe seems to have been drawn into the elongations and contractions of a gigantic metabolic system that turns the identifiable fragments of reality upside down. Catastrophes, accidents, sodomy – anything that we perceive as singular and prominent incidents standing out from our everyday life - appear in Wolf's texts in abundance, as though they had been bought by the hundred at the discounter and been dumped from the package to the floor.
A fantastic spectacle! It is exactly this fantastic accumulation of events which makes the texts so exclusive and entrancing. The truth of form manifests itself in immense clusters and their reciprocal relativization. In fact, these accumulations have been dominant for a long time in almost all areas of Western society, publicly and privately: in the supermarkets and in the news, in the disaster statistics and capital markets, even in love and death.«
Die Welt
Reviews
»Ror Wolf is a Hieronymus Bosch of story-telling and Tranchirer’s Lexicon is his “Garden of Pleasures”. (...) The style of the text draws on late 19th encyclopaedias intended for a middle class readership or domestic how-to books of the same period, that is from a time when there was still an optimistic belief in mankind’s steady progress towards a comprehensive scientific explanation of the world. It’s the popular version of this theory that Wolf undermines and deconstructs. He tears off the covers of the encyclopaedia, lets the individual parts simply lie there like the plucked prey of his thoughts, interrupts the pontificating flow, and between the cracks the uncanny wells up.
(...) Ror Wolf, one of the most idiosyncratic figures of experimental literature, is able like no other to lull the listener with the appearance of respectable middle-class and academic probity, but then to deprive him of the possibility of consistent behaviour and logic, torpedoing his sense of reality, and even causing him to experience the loss as a pleasure. To the delight of the audience Wolf systematically interrupts trains of thought, denying and breaking up the plot.«
Best Radio Play 2007 - German Academy of Performing Arts, Jury statement
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