The Notes

The Notes – the work of a »Montaigne of our time« – were written between 1934 and 1936, three years during which Hohl lived in the Netherlands in »greatest spiritual solitude«. Despite the short period of time in which the collection was written, it is a sum of his whole life and thinking.

The public always considered Ludwig Hohl a stranger. It was only very late that they tried to make up for what had been missed: in 1978, Hohl was presented with the most important prizes for his works, the Robert Walser Centenary Prize, followed by the Petrarca-Prize in 1980. The power of Hohl’s work is a consequence of the intensity of Hohl’s approach to everything he said and thought. But above all, it is the process of thinking, which is made transparent with this volume, the kind of thinking that Hohl perceived as work.

»A work, perceived of thirty years ago, before the Second World War, or, dated in a literary fashion: before Kafka broke out, before many a shift within the classics, before the posthumous coronation of Wittgenstein, before linguistic experiments that are now part of the compulsory curriculum of an averagely gifted person and before the declaration of ›texts‹; as such not a prophetic work, therefore not posthumously-relevant because the course of time has confirmed it, but as virulent now as it was decades ago and readable as if it had just been created, remotely contemporary, ›un-famed‹ but available, linguistically acute; I think, this is class.« Max Frisch

»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, author of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser

»The Notes should be celebrated: it is wonderful that this volume of [Hohl’s] compact, aphoristic observations has finally arrived in English.« Alexandra Sattler, Arts Fuse

»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