Jan Wilm
Read.Ror.Wolf
With several collages.
Essay, new
150pp (37.000 words)
Ror Wolf’s oeuvre is one of the most unusual in the German language. And one of the most eclectic. Following the publication of Wolf’s ballads and collages in the 1950s, he produced work in almost every genre until his death in 2020: prose, poetry, essays, radio plays, and film.
Jan Wilm considers Ror Wolf’s oeuvre for the first time and illuminates his recurring motifs, his intransigence, and his appreciation for form as well as his radical linguistic, pictorial, and sound innovations. Replete with collages and excerpts from interviews that Wilm conducted with Ror Wolf in the last several years, Read.Ror.Wolf roams through the vast realm of Wolf’s imagination. The book is both a critical evaluation of and homage to the author, who was also Wilm’s friend. Wilm writes about reading Ror Wolf and invites us to discover his work, which was always humorous, melancholy, reflective, existential, and playful. A book for Ror mavens and Wolf novices, Read.Ror.Wolf is a personal and aesthetic answer to the question: how should we live? Read.Ror.Wolf.
Reviews
»Every phrase is an adventure, not routine«
Daniel Meuren, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
»Jan Wilm approaches the work, language and ‘reality factory’ of his friend in an admiring and analytically illuminating way.«
Martin Halter, Badische Zeitung
»One expects disenchantment and decoding of an enigmatic cosmos of works, but receives, as in Wilm's dark snowflake novel Winter Yearbook, humanistic narrative magic.«
Clemens J. Setz
»Wilm's enthusiasm is refreshing, and even casual readers of Wolf's books [...] will be drawn into these fantastic worlds of production [...].«
Ulrich Rüdenauer, WDR3 Lesestoff
»The transmediality of the multi-artist [Wolf] is highlighted by Wilm in all the chapters of his worthy memorial book.«
Ulrich Rüdenauer, MDR Kultur Unter Büchern
»But the most important thing is: Jan Wilm writes all this tremendously personally - his book springs from a deep admiration for the author's work.«
Alexander Wasner, SWR2 Literatur
»Wilms's own sentence structures, his precision, his choice of words and word combinations [form] themselves an idiosyncratic, characteristic and above all enchanting language [...].«
Frederik Eicks, LITLOG-Magazin
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