The Invisible Apple
Der unsichtbare Apfel

robert gwisdek der unsichtbare apfel
Kiepenheuer & Witsch
March 2014 / 368pp
Fiction

This book is outside of the five-year window for guaranteed assistance with English language translation. We suggest getting in touch with the relevant funding body for an informal conversation about the possibility of support. Please refer to to our  recommendations page for books that are currently covered by our funding guarantee.

review

Robert Gwisdek’s fascinating debut follows the travails of Igor as he struggles to make sense of the world. Igor is a strange child who, at the age of five, realises to his astonishment that he exists. Unsure what to make of his existence, Igor tries to communicate with the universe and to impose some sort of order on the world by compulsively sorting things: hair bands, nails, bottle caps, chestnuts, even the boxes he sorts things into.

As a young adult Igor has a brief, romantic relationship and is devastated when this ends abruptly. Numb and withdrawn, Igor acts on a longstanding idea to try spending one hundred days in a room without light. He experiences fantastical, mathematically-inspired visions stemming from his altered mental state and keeps thinking he can hear knocking and people talking about a trial. He initially dismisses this as a figment of his imagination, but on the eighty-first day the door is broken down and men force him into a wheelchair. He realises that a trial really is about to begin.

The Invisible Apple is a delightfully philosophical, life-affirming book which highlights both the bleak isolation and the magic of human existence.

about the author

Robert Gwisdek dropped out of school and began working as an actor. He writes lyrics for the band Käptn Peng und die Tentakel von Delphi, for films, and writes and edits music videos and short films. He builds furniture and would like to stage dance performances. He’s from Berlin, but travels a lot.

rights information

Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch
Contact: Ms. Iris Brandt
Tel: +49 2213768522
Email: ibrandt@kiwi-verlag.de
www.kiwi-verlag.de

 

Kiepenheuer & Witsch was founded in 1949 in Cologne by two publishers from the Eastern Zone, Gustav Kiepenheuer and Joseph Caspar Witsch. The press’s early authors included Joseph Roth, Heinrich Böll and Erich Maria Remarque. Today Kiepenheuer & Witsch continues to publish leading contemporary German, Austrian and Swiss writers, as well as international authors in translation.

translation assistance

Applications should be made to the Goethe-Institut.

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All recommendations from Spring 2014