Palace of Flies - Heilbut

“Walter Kappacher’s novel triumphs in portraying a middle-aged writer who balances the most intimate behavior—insomnia, indigestion—with the grandest of artistic ambitions. He achieves a special pathos by deliberately not underlining what we know—that the fifty-year-old protagonist is a few years from a tragic death and that everything he represents will be burned alive. Kappacher captures a now almost unimaginable sensibility with absolute coherence one hundred years later.”