Lamentations of Zeno

Zeno Hintermeier is a scientist working as a travel guide on an Antarctic cruise ship, encouraging the wealthy to marvel at the least explored continent and to open their eyes to its rapid degradation. It is a troubling turn in the life of an idealistic glaciologist. Now in his early sixties, Zeno bewails the loss of his beloved glaciers, the disintegration of his marriage, and the foundering of his increasingly irrelevant career. Troubled in conscience and goaded by the smug complacency of the passengers in his charge, he starts to plan a desperate gesture that will send a wake-up call to an overheating world.The Lamentations of Zeno is an extraordinary evocation of the fragile and majestic wonders to be found at a far corner of the globe, written by a novelist who is a renowned travel writer. Poignant and playful, the novel recalls the experimentation of high-modernist fiction without compromising a limpid sense of place or the pace of its narrative. It is a portrait of a man in extremis, a haunting and at times irreverent tale that approaches the greatest challenge of our age-perhaps of our entire history as a species-from an impassioned human angle.

The best thing one could say of an author: he enriches us., Thrilling, nuanced, and chillingly meditative . Ilija Trojanow has written a modern fable tinged with absurd humor, dramatizing the high stakes of our current climate gamble., This is like the stream of consciousness of our planet's unraveling lifeworld, as channeled through its melting ice and a cruise ship naturalist in love with his doomed subject. Quick, dense, jagged, beautiful., The Lamentations of Zeno is electric, irresistible, well written and movingly topical. Ilija Trojanow, with several masterpieces to his name, never puts a foot wrong. He is as important a writer in this day and age as Günter Grass was for his-a joy to read., Perfectly paced, keenly insightful and wickedly funny, The Lamentations of Zeno is at once a much-needed indictment of the global climate crisis and a brilliant portrait of middle life. The Antarctic antics of Where'd You Go, Bernadette? meet the wit and wisdom of Herzog, with the politics ofFlight Behavior sprinkled on top: a treat!

Ilija Trojanow is a German novelist and travel writer, the author of many books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Collector of Worlds, Along the Ganges, and Mumbai to Mecca. His autobiographical debut novel was adapted into the award-winning film The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Just Around the Corner. A vocal critic of domestic surveillance and the NSA, Trojanow was at the center of a cause célèbre in 2013 when the United States refused him entry.