A firework of ingenuity: After the bestseller “The Raft of the Medusa,” Franzobel’s new novel follows in the footsteps of a fierce conqueror of the U.S. in 1538. Ferdinand Desoto had accompanied Pizarro to Peru, taught the Inca king chess and Spanish, impregnated his sister, and made a fortune from the slave trade. He was already famous when he launched a great expedition to Florida in 1538 that left a single trail of devastation across the American South. Nearly 500 years later, a New York lawyer is suing on behalf of all indigenous tribes to return the entire U.S. to the native peoples. Franzobel’s new novel is a firework of ingenuity and a parable for a society controlled by greed and egoism, steered to ruin by vain and incompetent leaders.
Franzobel, born in 1967 in Vöcklabruck, has received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (1995), the Arthur Schnitzler Prize (2002), and the Nicolas Born Prize (2017), among others. Zsolnay most recently published the crime novels “Wiener Wunder” (2014), “Groschens Grab” (2015), and “Rechtswalzer” (2019), as well as the novel “Das Floß der Medusa” in 2017, for which he was shortlisted for the German Book Prize and awarded the Bavarian Book Prize. Most recently, the novel “Die Eroberung Amerikas” was published in 2021.
From April 19 to July 19, 2021 on the YouTube channel of the Austrian Cultural Forum Bratislava.
