Author Description

"The System of Vienna details Gert Janke's travels through Vienna by streetcar, reporting the bizarre and frustrating encounters he experiences as he progresses - and meanwhile moving not just from trolley-stop to trolley-stop, but through life as well: from innocence to disillusionment, birth to death. Ionke meets a paranoiac fish wholesaler who believes he is directing all of Austrian politics from his little stall, a stamp collector in such deadly earnest he hopes to be appointed to a professorship in philately, and a compulsive talker who has developed a rigorous economic philosophy out of the most common objects to be found in a Vienna neighborhood. Slowly increasing the comic and fantastic elements in his story until they overwhelm all pretense to autobiography - culminating in a strangely touching love scene between Ionke and a caryatid - The System of Vienna reminds us that the very act of describing a life turns it into fiction." --Book Jacket.