Böcker av Erik Martiny

Himmler and the Handmaid is grounded in the little-known fact that Heinrich Himmler hadtwo-hundred thousand Polish children abducted and placed in German foster homes. Many>The first narrator of this story is Kaspar Blumenfeld, a retired, world-weary history professorwho happens to be a collector of memorabilia trawled in the murky depths of the dark web.His latest acquisition is a notebook written by an inmate of Wewelsburg, the castle thatHimmler leased for a hundred years so he could play out his occult fantasies, unbeknownst>Written by Eva Kauffmann, an unwilling handmaid imprisoned at the castle, the notebookunveils the exact nature of Himmler's appalling activities, prompting Blumenfeld to reveal his>"A deeply intriguing work of speculative historical fiction.">"Enchanting and surprising: Martiny never fails to delight.">"Erik Martiny is recommended reading.">"Refreshing and funny, balanced with the necessary darkness and depth.">"Both pertinent and impertinent, whimsical and grave."Amélie Cordonnier, author of En Garde

From the viewpoint of the first narrator in Cocteau's Invitation, Mr. Hearse has lived a neat and tidy life, one of convention, of order, without even a hint of the existential angst that plagues the narrator. Indeed, the narrator, a fifty-year-old teacher who is hopelessly entangled in an erotic affair with a student in her final year of school, is a disciple of Rabelais, Shakespeare, Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov, Kristeva, and Cixous. But when the narrator discovers an invitation from Jean Cocteau hidden away in a small wooden casket in the attic of Mr. Hearse's house, he realizes that he was mistaken about the life Mr. Hearse has lived. The latter two-thirds of the novel is devoted to the strange but compelling relationship between Mr. Hearse and Jean Cocteau. Mr. Hearse, as the actor of his tale, now becomes the narrator, but it is Jean Cocteau who is the Director of the narrative. It is Cocteau who sets up the encounter between Mr. Hearse and a modern-day bearded Tiresias. It is Cocteau who orchestrates the meeting on the Mirabeau Bridge. And Cocteau is the reason for travelling to Siam. By the end, of course, the reader understands that the reality of the fifty-year-old teacher presented in the beginning and the reality of Mr. Hearse's life are mirror images of each other, a fractured, fractal mirroring, to be sure, like a Picasso painting, where the boundaries between time and space are blurred. But that is exactly what we should expect in a novel in which Jean Cocteau resides as a character.

"A raunchy, gargantuan, irreverent dash through the fields of ripeness and desire, spiced by history with a lightly borne trail of cultural baggage. (Reads like fun)."George Szirtes, critic for The Times, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize"With The Pleasures of Queuing Erik Martiny joins Aidan Higgins, Julian Gough, Kevin Barry, on the more exuberant wing of the Irish comic novel. His is a frothy mix of cosmopolitanism and theologico-sexual intrigue, but echoing with an unmistakable steel behind the ribald laughs."David Wheatley, critic for The Guardian, winner of Rooney Prize for Irish Literature"Hilarious and heartfelt in equal measure, Erik Martiny's story of bohemia and bountiful creation has the verve and nerve and verbal inventiveness of early Philip Roth."Lee Jenkins, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry"The Pleasures of Queuing is an irresistible addition to the distinguished recent annals of the Irish comic novel. The breathless eloquence of Martiny's narrative sweep through the eccentricities of his version of Cork doesn't allow the reader a moment's pause."Bernard O'Donoghue, Oxford University, winner of the Whitbread Prize