The Birth of Proverbs

A notebook full of bizarre observations, wild contemplations and wicked comments on the world and the supposed recipes for making it a better place, or at least for finding a way to cope in it.

Günter Kunert is a special kind of chronicler. He brings us amazing news from Osmosistan and Dahlak; these are the names of two obscure countries between which strange shiploads of (generally useless) rotary irons are transported back and forth, two countries which could not be more different. They are fabrications of the author, just as countless proverbs and maxims that are often accredited to well-known personalities or authors. You recognize their origins, although they are not infrequently turned around to become something surprising or contrary, surreal, for »after Adam Ries there is a temptation for mathematicians to prove that two times two are five«.
In Kunert’s imagination, reports from afar and observations at close quarters are distorted and imbued with ironic, satirical, grotesque elements, presented full of fun and frivolity. The author began these notes in 1964, not least in order to create an »emergency exit« from situations of confinement, providing them with an amusing and unreal touch. This has resulted in a collection of ideas, contemplations, fun, distorted perspectives, microscopic views, snapshots, scorn and derision.

Amazing to read. It is a fact: Günter Kunert is the most important literary essayist amongst contemporary German literary figures. Sensitive, but never sentimental. Laconic through precision. And a rare thing: brave in the face of the friend.
Christian Eger, Mitteldeutsche Zeitung

The Author
Günter Kunert, born in Berlin in 1929, left the GDR in 1979 to move to West Germany, and now lives in Itzehoe. He has received a large number of notorious awards for his extremely varied and broad body of work – poems, essays, travel books, a novel, short stories, children’s books, plays, film scripts. Since 2005 he has been the President of the PEN Centre of German-Speaking Writers Abroad.
Published by Wallstein
News from Ambivalencia (Göttinger Sudelblätter, 2001); The Old Man Speaks with his Soul (2006); Das letzte Wort hat keiner. Über Schriftsteller und Schriftstellerei No one has the Last Word. On Writers and Writing (2009)