Here's some revisionist history for you: World War II has ended, but only in the West. The war in the Pacific will drag on for another 20 years before the atomic bomb is finally dropped at Hiroshima; in Germany, instead of the Marshall Plan, the victorious Allies have instituted a policy based on vengeance. The country has been completely deindustrialized: factories are torn down, roads destroyed, and the economy shattered. People live hardscrabble existences, scraping a living from the soil if they are honest, preying on others if they are not. Throughout the countryside, granite memorials have been erected as constant reminders of the Germans' transgressions, and long lines of repentant citizens pray before them for forgiveness that never comes. Such is the bleak landscape of German author Christoph Ransmayr's third novel, The Dog King. Ransmayr constructs his dystopian tale around three characters: Bering, a young man who lives near the quarry that provides the special green granite for the memorials; Ambras, the crippled master of the quarry; and Lily, known as "the Brazilian" for her attempt to seek refuge in South America. Having assembled his cast, Ransmayr sends them on a journey from the horrors of postwar Germany to the jungles of Brazil in search of more green granite. What happens there makes for a sensational ending to a very disturbing tale.

The Dog King

Literature & Fiction

Ransmayr, Christoph

Contemporary

Vintage

The Terrors of Ice and Darkness

Random House Value Publishing

Terrors of Ice and Darkness

Hunter Publishing+inc

From Christoph Ransmayr, whose brilliant rise to preeminence among the younger generation of writers in the German language was recently crowned when he shared with Salman Rushdie Europe's most prestigious new literary award, the Aristeion Prize--a novel in which fiction and history are forged into a universe of mythic intensity. World War II has ended, but only in the West. Central Europe is slipping back into its agricultural past. The bomb has not yet been dropped--nor will it be for twenty years. The Allies have punished Germany for its war crimes by forcing it to revert to a preindustrial age: power stations, railways, factories, and all the machinery of technology have been destroyed or abandoned and left to decay. Moor is a small quarry town (Mauthausen in the all-too-recent past of real history). The occupying American army has installed a camp survivor, Ambras, to govern the local population. Brave, lonely, hated and feared by his former persecutors, Ambras has returned to Moor only because his Jewish wife died there. Setting up house in a derelict villa surrounded by wild hounds that earn him the nickname the Dog King, he chooses another loner, the village boy Bering, as his bodyguard. Moving away from his family and into the compound, the boy enters a new universe of power, of half-glimpsed ideas, of contact with the forbidden world outside. And he meets the only other person Ambras welcomes, a strange and beautiful orphan girl named Lily who lives and hunts in the hills, who knows where the weapons are hidden and forages in the "free world for the goods the villagers crave. But Bering's new life begins to unravel as he succumbs to a strange eye disease known as Morbus Kitahara, in which the vision gradually darkens and which tends to afflict marksmen and sharpshooters. Only Lily can find help, can offer them all a possible future. The three make a courageous bid to escape, and the account of their flight brings the novel to its extraordinarily gripping and suspenseful climax. Searingly powerful, with a poetic intensity that stays with the reader long after the last page, The Dog King is a modern masterpiece.

KNOPF

Literary

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

A man goes in search of the Roman poet Ovid, banished to the end of the world. He finds that Ovid's personality and stories have undergone a sea-change, and have fragmented themselves into lots of clues - people, bizarre events, odd stretches of landscape, and a story emerges.

The Last World

GROVE PRESS

A man attempts to explain the disappearance of an Italian explorer in the Arctic in 1981 by reconstructing an Austrian expedition of a century before and, in the process, dispels many cherished notions about heroism

In The Atlas of an Anxious Man, Christoph Ransmayr offers a mesmerizing travel diary—a sprawling tale of earthly wonders seen by a wandering eye. This is an exquisite, lyrically told travel story. Translated by Simon Pare, this unique account follows Ransmayr across the globe: from the shadow of Java’s volcanoes to the rapids of the Mekong and Danube Rivers, from the drift ice of the Arctic Circle to Himalayan passes, and on to the disenchanted islands of the South Pacific. Ransmayr begins again and again with, “I saw. . .” recounting to the reader the stories of continents, eras, and landscapes of the soul. Like maps, the episodes come together to become a book of the world—one that charts the life and death, happiness and fate of people bound up in images of breathtaking beauty. “One of the German language’s most gifted young novelists.”—Library Journal, on The Terrors of Ice and Darkness

Atlas of an Anxious Man (The German List)

Travel

Travel Writing

Seagull Books

In a publishing world that is all too full of realist novels written in undistinguished prose, discernible only by their covers, The Flying Mountain stands out—if for no other reason than that it consists entirely of blank verse. And that form is most suitable for the epic voyage Christoph Ransmayr relates: The Flying Mountain tells the story of two brothers who leave the southwest coast of Ireland on an expedition to Transhimalaya, the land of Kham, and the mountains of eastern Tibet—looking for an untamed, unnamed mountain that represents perhaps the last blank spot on the map. As they advance toward their goal, the brothers find their past, and their rivalry, inescapable, inflecting every encounter and decision as they are drawn farther and farther from the world they once knew. Only one of the brothers will return. Transformed by his loss, he starts life anew, attempting to understand the mystery of love, yet another quest that may prove impossible. The Flying Mountain is thrilling, surprising, and lyrical by turns; readers looking for something truly new will be rewarded for joining Ransmayr on this journey.

The Flying Mountain (The German List)

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Books by Ransmayr, Christoph

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ransmayr, Christoph. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Dog King

The Terrors of Ice and Darkness

The Dog King

Terrors of Ice and Darkness

The Dog King

The Dog King

The Last World

The Terrors of Ice and Darkness

Atlas of an Anxious Man (The German List)

The Flying Mountain (The German List)