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    The Assignment: or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers
    The Assignment: or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers
    The Assignment: or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers
    Ebook103 pages1 hour

    The Assignment: or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers

    By Friedrich Durrenmatt, Joel Agee and Theodore Ziolkowski

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    In Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s experimental thriller The Assignment, the wife of a psychiatrist has been raped and killed near a desert ruin in North Africa. Her husband hires a woman named F. to reconstruct the unsolved crime in a documentary film. F. is soon unwittingly thrust into a paranoid world of international espionage where everyone is watched—including the watchers. After discovering a recent photograph of the supposed murder victim happily reunited with her husband, F. becomes trapped in an apocalyptic landscape riddled with political intrigue, crimes of mistaken identity, and terrorism.
    F.’s labyrinthine quest for the truth is Dürrenmatt’s fictionalized warning against the dangers of a technologically advanced society that turns everyday life into one of constant scrutiny. Joel Agee’s elegant translation will introduce a fresh generation of English-speaking readers to one of European literature’s masters of language, suspense, and dystopia.
     
    “The narrative is accelerated from the start. . . . As the novella builds to its horripilating climax, we realize the extent to which all values have thereby been inverted. The Assignment is a parable of hell for an age consumed by images.”—New York Times Book Review
     
    “His most ambitious book . . . dark and devious . . . almost obsessively drawn to mankind’s most fiendish crimes.”—Chicago Tribune
     
    “A tour-de-force . . . mesmerizing.”—Village Voice  
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateFeb 15, 2017
    ISBN9780226530543
    The Assignment: or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers
    Author

    Friedrich Durrenmatt

    Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) was a Swiss author and dramatist, most famous for his plays The Visit and The Physicists, which earned him a reputation as one of the greatest playwrights in the German language. He also wrote four highly regarded crime novels - The Pledge, The Judge and His Hangman, Suspicion and The Execution of Justice, all of which will be published by Pushkin Vertigo.

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    Reviews for The Assignment

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      F. a young filmmaker has been making an unofficial biography of a famous psychiatrist Otto von Lampert. von Lampert's wife Tina is found raped and murdered in the North African desert. After flying her coffin back to Europe suspended from a helicopter he hires F. to investigate the murder. The convoluted plot develops to include multiple mistaken identities, espionage, terrorism, government repression and a red fur coat.A highly experimental novel. After listening to the first half of Glenn Gould's recording of The Well Tempered Clavier (which has 24 sections) he decided to write the novel in 24 chapters each one sentence long. Since the book is 126 pages long this makes for some very long sentences (the longest is about 10 pages). Surprisingly, when he sticks to narration it is quite easy to follow but when he waxes philosophic it becomes quickly incomprehensible.I had only been acquainted with Durrenmatt's plays before; the darkly comic and bizarre Physicists and The Vist and the experimental play Meteor. While not as entertaining as Calvino or as deep as Borges this is still a valuable book to anyone interested in Durrenmatt's work.
    • 4/5
      The Assignment is ostensibly the story of a film portraitist, F., who is hired to investigate the murder of an eminent psychiatrist's wife in a unspecified North African country M. It soon becomes a political thriller as F. tries to navigate the various security services and international agents hoping to use her assignment for their own ends. The novel consists of twenty-four chapter-length sentences; Dürrenmatt's choice aptly evokes the estrangement and paranoia of F.A number of obvious comparisons arose; the use of the schematic mystery form to investigate identity and subjectivity recalls Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman, while the extended prose could be from any number of mid-century modernists. Perhaps the most interesting to me is the resituation of Kafka's absurd bureaucratic nightmare from Central Europe to the Maghreb. Did the political imperatives of the Cold War minimize that traditional relationship? Perhaps it was the contemporary intrigue in the region (Iran-Contra, Gaddafi's antics, etc) that brought that to light. Whichever way, it's unsettling and intriguing at once.The Assignment is ironically ultimately a statement about the unseen; about the agents of world powers using states as playing pieces, wars as testbeds, and people as tools. Dürrenmatt's implication of the dominant ideologies of the US and USSR as being just so much political faith is important and powerful.A major theme is, of course, observation and the effects of observation on identity. I'm not sure Dürrenmatt was as on target here as elsewhere; his use is leading but left me cold in the end. Maybe it's because the decentered subject and the proliferation of images are taken for granted these days that I can't work up enthusiasm for it. Still, interested readers would probably find something of value here.I was pleasantly surprised by The Assignment. I'd found his earlier work of the 1950's amusing but overly clever. The Assignment is the work of a mature artist capably expressing ideas. It's not a revolutionary work, but that doesn't matter. Dürrenmatt's novel is full of phrases of delightful clarity and strange insight; it's an exceptional work of European modernism that ought to be wider read.University of Chicago Press's edition includes a good foreward by Theodore Ziolkowski that puts the book in perspective. Agee's translation is readable and lucid.
    • 5/5
      This was an amazing book. The fact that it was made up of 24 sentences didn't get in the way of it's readability but seemed to add to the propulsive nature of the story. I love allegories and this deep and funny and great.

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