Leavetaking

""I was on my way to look for a life of my own." A brilliant, brutally honest autobiographical novel, long out of print, from one of the great artistic polymaths of the 20th century. This is a Sebaldian account of the narrator's attempt to break free of a repressive upper-middle-class upbringing and make his way as an artist and individual, written in a single incantatory paragraph. Leavetaking is the story of an upper-middle-class childhood and adolescence in Berlin between the wars. In the course ofthe book, Weiss plumbs the depths of family life: there is the early death of his beloved sister Margit, the difficult relationship with his parents, the fantasies of adolescence and youth, all set in the midst of an increasing anti-Semitism, which forces the Weiss family to move again and again, a peripatetic existence that only intensifies the narrator's growing restlessness. The young narrator is largely oblivious to world events and focused instead on becoming an artist, an ambition frustrated generally by his milieu and specifically by his mother, who, herself a former actress, destroys his paintings during one of the family's moves. In the end, he turns to an older mentor, Harry Haller, a fictionalized portrait of Hermann Hesse, who encouraged andsupported Weiss, and with Haller's example before him, the narrator takes his first steps towards a truly independent life. Intensely lyrical, written with great imaginative power, Leavetaking is a vivid evocation of a world that has disappeared and of the narrator's developing consciousness. THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY champions books from around the world that have been overlooked, underappreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored. They are issued in handsome, well-designed editions at reasonable prices in hopes of their passing from one reader to another--and further enriching our culture"--

PETER WEISS was a German writer, painter, graphic artist, and experimental filmmaker. He is best known for his plays "Marat/Sade" and "The Investigation," as well as the monumental three-volume historical novelThe Aesthetics of Resistance. Born in Germany in 1916 to a Christian mother and a Jewish father, he began his career as visual artist, studying at the Prague Art Academy in the late '30s. After the German occupation of the Sudetenland, his family moved to Sweden, where Weiss would spend the rest of his life, eventually becoming a Swedish citizen. His work won many major German literary awards, including the Buchner and Mann Prizes, and Peter Brook's production of "Marat/Sade" received the Tony Award for Best Play. Weiss died in 1982.

CHRISTOPHER LEVENSON is a prominent Canadian poet. He was the co-founder of Arc Magazine and of the Harbinger Poets imprint of Carleton University Press.