SECOND THROUGH BRAIN
a novel, by Melchior Vischer
ISBN 978-0-9931955-1-8Translated by David Vichnar & Tim Konig Paperback, 120pp
Publication date: November 2015
Equus Press: London
Price: € 15.00 (not including postage)
Proclaimed as the "first Dada novel" & the "literary equivalent of Cezanne," Melchior Vischer's Sekunde durch Hirn (Second Through Brain, 1920) is composed as a series of disconnected vignettes that flash through the mind of one Jorg Schuh as he falls from the scaffolding of a 40-storey construction site. With its boldly idiosyncratic technique, Vischer's novel is a major document of the Zurich-Prague-Berlin Dada axis. Largely forgotten after World War II, Sekunde durch Hirn is an important rediscovered landmark of the inter-war European avant-garde, here translated into English for the first time.
"There is a sense of potential lethality about this work. A prevailing sense of doom hangs over its subjects maybe because the author himself felt sensitive to the apocalyptic mood of an age that was rapidly modernising and increasingly unforgiving. And in this Vischer displays his greatest sense of affinity with the Dadaist movement that he claimed membership of [...]. Vischer is also weaving a cautionary tale for us one in which we should not be wary of machinery but humanity itself and the evils and injustices that it is capable of as seen in this novel." (Mark O'Leary)
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