The Children of the Dead

The magnum opus of 2004 Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek—a spectral journey through the catastrophic history embedded in the landscape of Austria  “The surface of [Jelinek’s] prose cracks and bursts . . . fissured by phantasmagorical description, gallows humor, multilingual puns, and scouring sarcasm. . . . Jelinek’s novel is finally . . . a furious accumulation of lost moments and possible outcomes, an enormous, spectral kaleidoscope erected before the unfathomable.”—Dustin Illingworth, Washington Post   The Alpenrose is a mountain resort nestled in Austria’s scenic landscape among historic churches and castles.

It is a vacation idyll that attracts tourists from all over Europe.

It is also a mass burial site.   Amid the snow-topped peaks and panoramic vistas, ghosts haunt the forest: Edgar Gstranz, a young skier who died in a car crash; Gudrun Bichler, a philosophy student who committed suicide in her bathtub; and Karin Frenzel, a widow who (perhaps) died in a bus accident.

As the three slip in and out of the hotel, engaging unsuspecting tourists and seeking a way to return to life, the soil begins to crack under their feet as the dead of the Holocaust awaken: zombies determined to exact their revenge.   Scrupulously rendered for the first time in English by Gitta Honegger, The Children of the Dead takes readers on a mind-bending ride through time, space, and memory.

Concocted from experimental theater, splatter film, Gothic literature, philosophy, religion, and more, Jelinek’s phantasmagorical masterwork is a fierce confrontation with our fraught legacies in the name of the innocent dead.