• ISBN13: 9780857424327
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: English Literature
• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Publisher Imprint: Seagull
• Publication Date: September 16, 2017
• Pages: 232
• Original Price: INR 599.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 450 grams

At the Burning Abyss is Franz Fuhmann’s magnum opus a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent century and the liberating power of poetry. Picking up where his last book, the Jew Car, left off, Fuhmann probes his own susceptibility to ideology’s seductions Nazism, then socialism and examines their antidote, the goad of Trakl’s enigmatic verses. He confronts Trakl’s “unlivable life,” as his poetry transcends the panaceas of black-and-white ideology, ultimately bringing a painful, necessary understanding of “the whole human being: In victories and triumphs as in distress and defeat, in temptation and obsession, in splendour and in ordure.” In 1982, the German edition of at the Burning Abyss won the West German Scholl Siblings Prize, celebrating its “courage to resist inhumanity.” At a time of political extremism and polarization, has lost none of its urgency.

Franz Fuhmann (1922-84) is one of modern Germany’s most fascinating literary figures and the author of dozens of novels, short stories, essays, poems, ballets and children’s books.