Robert Seethaler Turns an Ordinary Street Into a Novel's Main Character
In "La Rue," the Austrian writer trains his eye, honed by years of walking cities, on the small, anonymous lives of people who happen to live along the same road.
Robert Seethaler's new novel, "La Rue," takes as its subject not a person but a place: an unremarkable street and the residents who pass along it. According to Le Monde, the Austrian author, described as an ultra-sensitive pedestrian, uses the book to capture the minuscule, unremarked destinies of these anonymous neighbors, elevating their ordinary existences into something worth telling.
Le Monde's account gives no plot beyond this premise, no publisher name and no page count, but the framing situates the book squarely within Seethaler's known territory: modest lives, observed closely, rendered without melodrama. The author has built a reputation, in earlier novels available to French readers in translation, for finding weight in the seemingly small — a trait the newspaper's summary suggests is again at work here, this time applied to a whole street rather than a single character.
No French publication date, translator or original German title is given in the source material, so readers keeping an eye out for "La Rue" on shelves will need to wait for further detail from the publisher or from fuller coverage.
Sources
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