Barbara Frischmuth Die Entschlüsselung (Decoding) Aufbau Verlag, June 2001. 195pp. ISBN 3-351-02927-6 'Six Characters in Search of a Story' might serve as a summary, if not indeed as the title, of this short novel, a work of remarkable ingenuity and imagination by one of Austria's best known contemporary writers. The story within which the characters are seeking their place is supplied by a package of apparently blank pages that fall almost literally at the feet of the unnamed narrator from the belly of a stuffed badger being sold at a local flea market. This obscure object of desire brings the six characters to the narrator's door. They are Çamuroglu, a historian and philologist from Istanbul; two fancily-dressed male scholars engaged in feminist studies; a brusque local professor called Unumgang, or 'Straighttothepoint'; the local priest; and - not to be forgotten - the priest's dog Rufus. They are supported by a range of other participants, both animal and vegetable, serving as links between the local setting (Altaussee and the Grundlsee in the Austrian Salzkammergut) and the oriental dimension represented by Çamuroglu. And the blank pages? Evidently written in a kind of invisible ink, they reveal a correspondence between a thirteenth-century local abbess and mystic and - chronologically impossible - a heretical fourteenth-century Azeri poet and dervish. It is the making visible and interpreting of this correspondence to which the title, 'Decoding', refers. As the book progresses and the possible interpretations multiply ad absurdum the reader becomes increasingly aware of the ways in which it also functions as a disquisition on modes of writing, both academic and literary, and the processes of research and imaginative association that underpin it. In the end, too, this turns out to have been the main theme of the book, an exploration of the way in which it has come into being even in the telling of it. A light but deft touch, an underlying strain of humour, and one unusually bizarre and erotic episode add to the overall enjoyment. A privileged read and treat.