Novel
Der Rote Ritter
Not translated into English
Adolf Muschg · 1993
Synopsis
The novel takes up the story of Parzival as Wolfram von Eschenbach and Chrétien de Troyes had fixed it, and does not obey it. An ignorant boy leaves home to find himself in the world and passes through that of the knights, under the eyes of narrators who take turns and attend to what each person can or cannot read. The narrative moves from tale to essay, brings the Middle Ages closer to the nineties, and makes the Grail a black hole that men must fill themselves.
Context
Suhrkamp published it in 1993, a thousand and six pages in a hundred chapters; the last, entitled “The Reader”, is entirely blank, as if to make whoever holds the book the last of the narrators. It has been read as a postmodern novel, and it is regarded as its author's principal work. Beat Mazenauer sees in it a more ironic, more colourful and more ambivalent book than its model, in which the author lets himself be seen behind his hero.
Who it is for
More than a thousand pages in German, never translated into French; the material is that of the medieval Parzival, and no fidelity is promised.
Prizes and reception
It won its author the Georg Büchner Prize in 1994, the year after its publication, according to the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland.