The Giraffe's Neck
Author(s): Judith Schalansky
Adaptation is everything, something Frau Lomark is well aware of as the biology teacher at the Charles Darwin High School in a country backwater of the former East Germany. It is the beginning of the new school year, but, as people look west in search of work and opportunities, it's future begins to be in doubt. Frau Lohmark has no sympathy for her pupils and scorns indulgent younger teachers who talk to their students as peers, play games with them, or (worse) even go so far as to have 'favourites'. A strict devotee of the Darwinian principle of evolution, Frau Lohmark believes that only the best specimens of a species are fit to succeed. But now everything and everyone resists the old way of things and Inge Lohmark is forced to confront her most fundamental lesson: she must adapt or she cannot survive. Written with cool elegance and humane irony, The Giraffe's Neck is an exquisite revelation of a novel, and what the novel can do, that will resonate in the reader's mind long after the last page has been turned.
General Information
- :
- : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- : 0.336
- : 01 January 2014
- : United Kingdom
- : 01 March 2014
- : books
Other Specifications
- : Judith Schalansky
- : Hardback
- : Apr-14
- : 224
More About The Product
A startling, inventive novel by one of Germany's most original young authors
Just as the world which Inge Lohmark has painstakingly built up around her crumbles, so too does the utopia of a country founded upon a vision that is both rigid and deterministic La Repubblica, Italy Her book is at once a report on the new Germany, an acid reflection on school and adolescence, the portrait of a woman and a study of concrete cases illustrating the eternal "struggle for life" according to Darwin Liberation, France Schalansky writes her way into current European literature with this little pearl of a novel Berlingske Tidende, Denmark Sublime . A beautifully quirky novel, genuinely recommended Trouwe, Holland An utterly exquisite object: a Wunderkammer and bestiary Robert Macfarlane, Guardian on Atlas of Remote Islands
Judith Schalansky was born in 1980 in Greifswald in the former East Germany. She studied art history and communication design and works as a freelance writer in Berlin. Schalansky's previous book Atlas of Remote Islands won the Stiftung Buchkunst (Book Art Foundation) award for 'the most beautiful book of the year' and was published to acclaim in the UK and the USA in 2010. The Giraffe's Neck is her first novel to be published in English. She lives in Berlin. Shaun Whiteside is a translator from German, French, Italian and Dutch. His translations from German include novels by Bernhard Schlink, Pascal Mercier, Zoran Drvenkar and Marlen Haushofer, as well as works by Freud, Nietzsche, Musil and Schnitzler. His translation of Lilian Faschinger's Magdalena the Sinner won the 1996 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize. He lives in London with his wife and son.
