Tigor

"Tigor is an adventure novel, the minute details of which read real to the extremeóthey appear as though they had been seen, touched, smelled, and tasted by the author himself. The reading offers a sheer delight."
-Peter Handke

"This novel is spectacularly successful in making sense of the beguiling and the contrary, in investigating and accommodating the mess of the modern world."
-The Times Literary Supplement

"It is encouraging, in what seems an increasingly anti-intellectual world, to find a novel which, while making no apology for its own cleverness, wears its learning so lightly. A fitting homage to Beckett, one feels."
-The Times of London

"Jungk has created a Quixote of deep and heartbreaking humanity, whose terrible end shows up not the emptiness of belief but the savagery of ignorance."
-The Independent

Giacopo Tigor, the unassuming hero of Peter Stephan Jungkís novel, is a professor of mathematics, a proponent of Euclidian geometry reeling from a succession of intellectual defeats sustained at the hands of the advocates of chaos theory. Returning to his native city of Trieste for a conference, Tigor finds he is no longer able to face the banal constraints of the life he has made, and so he goes AWOL-first to Paris, where he fulfills a boyhood dream to work in the Odéon Theater as a stagehand. There he experiences a vision of Mount Ararat, holy mountain of the Armenian people, the landing point of Noah's Ark. His vision drives him onward to the East, where his flight evolves into a questóto find the remains of the Ark.

Tigor is an inspired marriage of the mysterious and the seemingly mundane, of gentleness and drama, order and chaos. This utterly singular work reimagines the novel form, and lingers in the readerís mind long after it has been set aside.

Peter Stephan Jungk

Peter Stephan Jungk was born in Los Angeles, raised in several European cities, and now lives in Paris. A former screenwriting fellow of the American Film Institute, he is the author of eight books, including the acclaimed biographyFranz Werfel: A Life from Prague to Hollywood (1990) and the novels Tigor (Handsel Books, 2004), a finalist for the British Foreign Book Award, andThe Perfect American (Handsel Books, 2004), a fictional biography of Walt Disney's last months, which had its premiere as an opera by Philip Glass at Madrid's Teatro Real in January 2013.

Michael Hofmann

Michael Hofmann has translated Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth, Patrick S, Herta Mueller, and Franz Kafka. He won the Translators' Association's Schlegel-Tieck Prize twice in 1988 for his adaptation ofThe Double Bass by Patrick S (1987), and in 1993 for his rendering of Wolfgang Koeppen'sDeath in Rome (1992). In 1999 he won the PEN/Book of the Month Club Translation Prize forThe String of Pearls. His translation of his father's novel The Film Explainer, by Gert Hofmann, won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1995. He has written and translated more than 35 books, winning eight awards for his translations and his poetry.