From the Deep Sea

Midnight Society was supposed to be the title of the novel that Ludwig Hohl wanted to write about Bohemian life in 1920’s Paris. Dreamers, drinkers, scroungers, unappreciated writers, artist living below the poverty line, who all meet in the same cafés, restaurants and bars in Montparnasse every night and from there set out on their expeditions into more ill-reputed quarters – Ludwig Hohl was among them as an observer.

In notebooks that were found in his estate, he depicts the nightly Parisian encounters with a clear eye, occasionally ironic and satirical, and shows an extraordinary feel for everything that is human, or all too human, and interpersonal. His notes were never to become a completed novel. Hohl’s resolution, to always keep track of his writing and to disregard anything autobiographical is soon to be discarded: what happens to him overwhelms him, exceeds his narrative persona, denies a conventional novelistic form.

From the Deep Sea gives an insight into the atmosphere of 1920’s Paris and into the intimate thoughts of a young author, his unconditional love for the truth, his wishes and fears, his moral rigorism that keeps being smashed to pieces and his unusual conception of sin.

»Ludwig Hohl’s work, like almost no other these days, can be picked up and read without prerequisite or compromise. It’s as outrageous as it is self-evident. It doesn’t have to be discovered, recommended or be made accessible by interpretation, but is available freely to be read, like a human piece of writing belonging to nature and giving it a soul in the first place.« Peter Handke

»[Hohl] was a voyeur where the nuances and shivers of sensitivity are concerned. Hohl experienced physical and psychological phenomena as endlessly fragmented. With disillusioned qualms, he assembled these fragments to a mosaic of language that is of extraordinary clarity.« George Steiner

»Hohl is a great discovery, an unjustly neglected author.« Susan Bernofsky

»Swiss writer Ludwig Hohl is always good for a pointed and surprising observation. His work reveals countless idiosyncratic notes, among them maxims, parables, small portraits, sketches: the forms often merge into one another.« Martin Zingg, Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag