The Abbey By Alois Brandstetter, Translated by Peter and Evelyn Firchow Afterword by Peter Firchow

The Abbey is a brilliant comic tour de force, set in contemporary Austria. The first-person narrator is a provincial police inspector whose tale concerns the mysterious disappearance of the Arnulf Chalice, the ancient and irreplaceable emblem of the Abbey which disappeared during the recent celebration marking the twelve-hundredth anniversary of the Abbey's foundation. His work as a detective, while in its own right interesting and remarkable, is only the pretext for a wide-ranging psychological and spiritual investigation of the condition of post-war Austria: its consumer society, its transformation of religion and history into tourism, and most important, its failure to look itself squarely in the eye. The resulting image turns out to be devastatingly funny.