Bullaun Press is happy to announce the upcoming release of our next title, Without Waking Up – a translation of the 2012 novel, Einmal muss ich über weiches Gras gelaufen sein by Austrian author Carolina Schutti. The first of Schutti’s novels to appear in English, Without Waking Up offers a tender account of displacement, delicately translated by Deirdre McMahon.
Sifting through memories, simple scenes nestled into one another like her own beloved wooden doll, the Matryoshka, Maja struggles to unearth her identity. She is marked by a lingering absence – of homeland, mother tongue, mother, warmth. Raised in an unfamiliar country by her taciturn aunt, Maja has brief moments of connection with her fading past such as through her childhood friendship with Marek, a Polish refugee with his own stories of love and loss in the face of war and displacement. An adult Maja finds herself again and again on the outside of her relationships with others, and with herself. This poetic, yet unadorned, text invites an open-ended exploration of the relationship between language and identity.
Recipient of the European Prize for Literature in 2015, already translated into 13 languages, Einmal muss ich über weiches Gras gelaufen sein has received international praise:
The careful, spare prose leaves plenty of space for the readers’ imagination and stays with them long after reading.
One of the most important voices in contemporary Austrian literature.
Maja decides to run away but she is imprisoned by a chain she cannot break: the nostalgia for her birth tongue and the desire for her stories. A subtle book, to be savoured.
In a clear and poetic style, Schutti describes the situation of people who have been displaced…in an entirely non-political and clear-sighted way…The theme of this novel contains a very contemporary dimension which could apply to countless regions of the world.