Improbable Journeys

Translated from the German by Geoff Wilkes

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The essays in this volume record journeys which are improbable in every sense. Writing in Viennese cafés on whatever paper is to hand, Ilse Aichinger travels into history, into memory, into the present and into her imagination. She traces the life story of her great grandfather „Dziadzio“, recalls the cramped apartment in post-war Vienna where she sat at a „little whitepainted kitchen table and started writing The Greater Hope,“ ponders „the limits of what could be comprehended“ after the 11th of September 2001, and Pictures Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking riding on Vienna’s No. 71 tram, „although she’s anarchic enough to be barely imaginable ‘where we live.’“ As Rüdiger Görner comments in his introduction to this first English translation of Unglaubwürdige Reisen, Aichinger’s remarkable journeys „pulsate with life and wisdom, with joy in exploring and in the myriad possibilities of meaning.“