The Cities

In the newest instalment of his book series Ortsumgehung, Andreas Maier takes us on a journey. He paints the picture of the past decades by reference to the cities and landscapes that flanked the tourist trails of a society obsessed with mobility.

There is the car trip with his parents to the hated holiday apartment in Brixen when he is seven, or hitchhiking to the south of France as a sixteen-year-old and listening to discourses on naked breasts on the beach. In Piedmont a suicide fails miserably and finally, as budget airline tourism descends upon us en masse, he prefers to go to Weimar – where he is surprised to see the New Right march across the Frauenplan.

»Alas, how futile is driving!« Gottfried Benn once wrote. Andreas Maier describes the futility of his and possibly everyone’s driving and travelling in his uniquely subtle and highly comical style. And he succeeds in creating a social portrait across three decades with magical ease.

»The Cities is the eighth short passage of Maier’s cycle of auto-fictional novels […] In the novels, Maier unflinchingly visits his past life and […] there are many reasons for why [we] enjoy reading these reports.« Cornelius Pollmer, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»Once more Andreas Maier proves himself to be a master of sublime laconism.« Andreas Platthaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»... whether intentional or coincidence: With The Cities Andreas Maier has written the book of comfort for these times.« Gerrit Bartels, Der Tagesspiegel

»Maier‘s cycle of novels is the nagging doubt about everything ...« Christian Thomas, Frankfurter Rundschau

»By no means does Maier merely gather travelogues; instead, he uses travel to explore the self. And incidentally, Maier traces the changes within touristic travel of recent decades through his close observations.« Guido Speckmann, neues deutschland

»At times, [the texts] are marvellously wicked, sometimes a little too funny, but mostly characterised by a delicate perception of the self and the world.« Andreas Wirthensohn, WDR

»With every volume this at first glance conventional, seemingly harmless autobiographical project reveals itself instead to be a radical subversion of identity and the obliteration of one’s own background, and Andreas Maier the worthy heir of Thomas Bernhard.« Richard Kämmerlings, DIE WELT on The Family

»What makes the success of Knausgård, Henschel, and Maier likewise, is the ordinariness of the events retold – childhood friendships, families’ misfits, disasters at school, the discovery of sexuality, adolescent politicization but also aestheticisation – but it also asserts that certain literary aspiration that fiction usually attests phantasy through the preciseness of description.« Andreas Platthaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on The University