O-Töne: Elias Hirschl | Manuela Tomić

Elias Hirschl “Schleifen”
Franziska Denk grows up in the milieu of the Vienna Circle and, as a child, suffers from a strange illness: any symptom she hears or reads about immediately manifests itself in her. In Otto Mandl, a brilliant mathematician, the young Franziska finds her soulmate. She learns to immunise herself against her suffering using words from dead languages. The two develop an absolute obsession with language and from then on, together, search for the perfect language, pushing the boundaries as far as they can go. “Schleifen” is a grand, intelligent novel about the power and influence of language on our lives, and it’s a real pleasure to read. Time and again, the sheer unbelievable turns out to be true in Elias Hirschl’s work, and the rest is extremely well-crafted.

Manuela Tomić “Franček“
Ms. B. has been tormented by the little rascal for months. He perches on her taste buds and feasts, taps her Adam’s apple like a woodpecker, and occasionally jumps right in front of her eyes. Ever since the imp began tormenting her, she has been holed up in the row house with Ms. Wahl, the police sergeant and midwife, the cat lady, the doctor, and the lawyer. Her great love, the womanizer, wants nothing to do with the imp. Yet the imp seems inescapable. He sets in motion a Bosnian family trauma in Ms. B. that already plagued her grandfather. Memories of the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, and the war merge with desires for children and a woman’s destructive rage. Ms. B. wants to give birth to the little rascal. One evening, however, little Franček appears in her dreams, and Ms. B. finds herself in a courtroom. Franček, the debut novel by Manuela Tomić, reads like a fabulous fever dream in a surrealist guise with mad twists. In 2024, Wieser Verlag published her collection of short prose, Zehnfingermärchen, in which she also lyrically explores her Yugoslav family history and the experience of arriving in a foreign country.