Tigor

"Tigor is an adventure novel, the minute details of which read real to the extremeothey appear as though they had been seen, touched, smelled, and tasted by the author himself. The reading offers a sheer delight." -Peter Handke "This novel is spectacularly successful in making sense of the beguiling and the contrary, in investigating and accommodating the mess of the modern world." -"The Times Literary Supplement" "It is encouraging, in what seems an increasingly anti-intellectual world, to find a novel which, while making no apology for its own cleverness, wears its learning so lightly. A fitting homage to Beckett, one feels." -"The Times of London" "Jungk has created a Quixote of deep and heartbreaking humanity, whose terrible end shows up not the emptiness of belief but the savagery of ignorance." -"The Independent" Giacopo Tigor, the unassuming hero of Peter Stephan Jungkis novel, is a professor of mathematics, a proponent of Euclidian geometry reeling from a succession of intellectual defeats sustained at the hands of the advocates of chaos theory. Returning to his native city of Trieste for a conference, Tigor finds he is no longer able to face the banal constraints of the life he has made, and so he goes AWOL-first to Paris, where he fulfills a boyhood dream to work in the Odeon Theater as a stagehand. There he experiences a vision of Mount Ararat, holy mountain of the Armenian people, the landing point of Noah's Ark. His vision drives him onward to the East, where his flight evolves into a questoto find the remains of the Ark. "Tigor" is an inspired marriage of the mysterious and the seemingly mundane, of gentleness and drama, order and chaos. This utterly singular work reimagines the novel form, and lingers in the readeris mind long after it has been set aside."

About the Author :
Peter Stephan Jungk Peter Stephan Jungk was born in Los Angeles, raised in several European cities, and now lives in Paris. A former screenwriting fellow of the American Film Institute, he is the author of eight books, including the acclaimed biography "Franz Werfel: A Life from Prague to Hollywood" (1990) and the novels "Tigor" (Handsel Books, 2004), a finalist for the British Foreign Book Award, and "The Perfect American" (Handsel Books, 2004), a fictional biography of Walt Disney's last months, which had its premiere as an opera by Philip Glass at Madrid's Teatro Real in January 2013. Michael Hofmann Michael Hofmann has translated Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth, Patrick S, Herta Mueller, and Franz Kafka. He won the Translators' Association's Schlegel-Tieck Prize twice in 1988 for his adaptation of "The Double Bass" by Patrick S (1987), and in 1993 for his rendering of Wolfgang Koeppen's "Death in Rome" (1992). In 1999 he won the PEN/Book of the Month Club Translation Prize for "The String of Pearls." His translation of his father's novel "The Film Explainer," by Gert Hofmann, won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1995. He has written and translated more than 35 books, winning eight awards for his translations and his poetry.

Review :
"Providence Journal" 2004, Tom D'Evelyn Peter Stephan Jungk's new book works two ways: as a fable of a postmodern type of intellectual and as a novel of the picaresque variety. The hero reflects Jungk's own multicultural background: born in California and raised in Europe. His eponymous hero, Giacopo Tigor, was born in Trieste and is a professor of mathematics in Philadelphia. Or was until he suffered a crisis: Attending a conference, he is confronted by the absurdity of his pet mathematical theory. As his world implodes, Tigor begins an odyssey of Homeric variety but upside down: as he reaches the end, he is even farther away from happiness. He is marked by a suggestibility that reminds one of Don Quixote -- with this crucial difference: Tigor is yet immune to the charms of literature. Among the authors he is unfamiliar with, we are told, are Cervantes, Yeats and Dostoevksy, each a student of what ails him. Tigor begins his odyssey by living off the land in an Italian forest. When he nearly starves to death, he moves to Paris where he fulfills a childhood dream of working as a stagehand in a theater. This move would seem to be progress of a kind - working in the "heaven" of ropes that govern scene shifts. But this childhood dream gives way to a deeper crisis: his decision, made by default, to search Mount Ararat for remains of the biblical ark, brings him face to face with an overwhelming variety of follies, including the kind now classified as terrorism. During his wanderings, Tigor experiences many epiphanies of bad but durable ideas: for example, at a dance, he is the target of the affections of a spherical woman (a parody of the myth of love in Plato's Phaedrus). But there is nothing abstract about the texture of this novel of ideas: the rendering of the variegated surface of Tigor's marvelous life has a Flaubertian gloss. The final episode comprises an explosive mix of satire, sentiment, and a kind of bitter grandeur that strikes the reader as an epiphany of the Age of Terror. Tigor must be reread for it to give up all its secrets, and the density of the fabric may seem heavy to some readers. But for those willing and able to suspend disbelief, Tigor has that lightness that marks it as a certain kind of masterpiece.