Review
"Death in Rome is the most devastating novel about the Germans that I have ever read, and one of the most arresting on any subject. It takes a German family―not a real German family, not even a caricature of a German family, but a prototypical German family that George Grosz would have had the bile but not the wit to invent, and Musil or Mann the wit but not the bile―and brings them to Rome."
― Michael Hofmann, from the afterword
"Formidable mastery."
― The Independent
"The reader closes Death in Rome not knowing whether he has just witnessed a murder or the creation of a masterpiece. The answer is: both."
― The New York Times
"Germany’s greatest living writer."
― Günter Grass
"Scathingly beautiful―lyrically inescapable."
― Nadine Gordimer
"There are rare writers who inform and enthrall, even terrify. The gifted German enigma Wolfgang Koeppen (1906–1990) is one such witness: candid and strange, allusive, unsettling. Time and again Koeppen stage-manages an unforgettable scene."
― Irish Times
"It is hard to think of a German writer of his generation who has written more sensitively or more profoundly about the Holocaust and its effects than Wolfgang Koeppen."
― Ruth Franklin, The New Republic
"A forgotten masterpiece: Michael Hofmann has illuminated a dark corner of recent European history."
― The Evening Standard
"In a many-toned language Koeppen not only depicts a cacophonous world but peoples it with individuals whose lives barely overlap. The result documents a uniquely German situation; it also, with its echoes of James Joyce and John Dos Passos, reconnects the German novel at a surprisingly early date to modernist fiction."
― The Independent
"Almost eerily contemporary in its concerns, and remarkable as a sidelong, searing appraisal of the legacy of the Nazi years, it is a recovered masterpiece."
― Publishers Weekly
"The whorl of Koeppen’s fragments is always steeled by his precision and capacity for revelation, and each word in Hofmann’s translation feels fixed in place as though it were a mortared brick."
― TLS
"Those who haven’t read this novel cannot claim to know German literature after 1945."
― Marcel Reich-Ranicki
"Now that the final two books of Koeppen’s peculiar trilogy have been reissued in English by the publisher New Directions, we can see that it is a triumph, a gem of postwar German literature that has remained obscure in the Anglophone world for too long. These ribald, irreverent, cutting, rhapsodic, and ultimately devastating portraits of German amnesia and hypocrisy, with their long, torqued sentences and jostling casts of doomed characters, were difficult for Koeppen’s contemporaries to assimilate. Formally, they were a ferment of hallucination, memory, fantasy, confession, and accusation. Substantively, they had little in common with the pacifying products of a culture that had decided, in the words of the novelist W. G. Sebald, to 'proceed on its way,' after the Second World War, 'almost undisturbed, as if nothing had happened.' [...] Like Joyce’s masterpiece and another book often described as its German analogue, Alfred Döblin’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1929), each febrile installment takes place in a single city, and each compresses its action into a one- or two-day frenzy. Koeppen’s chapters are often fractured into short sections, yet these fragments are wonderfully overfull. Their sinuous sentences span pages and veer off into wild clauses, and they are densely allusive, reeling from Romantic poetry to Gertrude Stein to Plato, lurching from one character’s point of view to the next. Headlines and advertisements blare out; lists repeat and iterate. In “The Hothouse,” a wordless vocalization from Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, “wagalaweia,” is a frequent refrain―a fitting motif for novels that are not plotted so much as composed. Their many narratives and perspectives tend to converge, as music does, in concluding crescendos."
― Becca Rothfeld, The New Yorker
"One of the great reading experiences of my life. It lays bare the way a nation’s private bitterness is banked like tinder, awaiting the opportunist’s torch. Taken together, the novels compose a grand taxonomy of resentment, one of the most cleareyed ever written....The Trilogy of Failure captures a lifetime of inertia, of feckless starts and stops. Beautiful, wise, bleak and unsparing, it wonders what might emerge from history’s devastation. Who will inherit the earth?"
― Dustin Illingworth, The New York Times
"Though others tried, it took a generation before Koeppen could become fully alive in English ... Michael Hofmann hasn’t just translated the books; he recreates Koeppen’s energy and style, a literary achievement in its own right."
― Tablet
"The prose, at least as it comes to us in Hofmann’s worked magic, is simultaneously wild, fluid, often flat-out gorgeous, and uncannily precise. Reading, one feels at the center of a living thing rather than looking on from a safe distance―receiving thoughts and sensations just as they’re hatching into the articulable."
― Deborah Eisenberg, New York Review of Books
About the Author
Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1996) was born in Greifswald and died in Munich. He worked as a junior chef, a dramaturge, and an editor. In 1951, 1953 and 1954 three novels were published to high acclaim for accurately capturing the atmosphere of the republic under Konrad Adenauer: Pigeons on the Grass, The Hothouse, and Death in Rome.
The award-winning translator Michael Hofmann has also translated works by Jenny Erpenbeck, Gert Hofmann, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, and Joseph Roth for New Directions. His translation of Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2024.
Joshua Cohen is the author of six novels, one collection of short fiction, and one collection of nonfiction. Called "a major American writer" by the New York Times, and "an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today" by the New Yorker, Cohen was awarded the 2013 Matanel Prize, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. The Netanyahus won the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
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