• Brenner
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Archipelago Books

Brenner

Brenner

by Hermann Burger, translated from the German by Adrian Nathan West

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Shrouded in a thick cloud of cigar smoke, Hermann Arbogast Brenner, scion of an old and famous cigar dynasty, needs to settle his affairs, codifying his forty-six years of life, in a Proustian attempt to conjure the wounds, joys, and sensations of his childhood in the rolling countryside of the Aargau region of Switzerland. Estranged from his wife and two children, he decides there is no point in squirreling away his fortune, so he buys himself a Ferrari 328 GTS and drives around sharing cigars with his few remaining friends. In this roman à clef, writing and smoking become intertwined through the act of remembering, as Brenner, a fallible, wounded, yet lovable antihero, searches for epiphany, to unearth memories just out of reach.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781953861306
Pages: 400
Publication Date:

Praise

In the guise of his narrator, Hermann Arbogast Brenner, Burger, the cigar lover, composes an autobiography of ashes: part wish-fulfillment, part settling of accounts, with the languid, bitter feel of a last smoke before an execution . . . rife with dialect and ornate, Latinate turns of phrase that possess rare evocative power.
—Uwe Schütte, Asymptote

There is, for the reader, a compelling claustrophobia in being immersed so thoroughly in such a warped subjectivity. It is this, ultimately, that Brenner shares with the best of Thomas Bernhard’s work: not merely the sheer bravura of a three-page sentence, but how such sentences capture the swerving freneticism and unreality of a mind in the act of consuming itself . . . Masterful and devastating . . .
—Charlie Lee, The Nation

Burger’s style [is] ... Proustian, the prose circling around childhood memories in long, cascading sentences that ‘annihilate space and time’ like the heady tobacco smoke that swirls around Brenner’s head.
—Ben Hutchinson, Literary Review

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