Calm By Marianne Gruber, Translated and with an Afterword by Margaret Peischl

This novel deals with the murder of a Slovenian kitchen maid in a resort town in the rural Austrian province of Carinthia. The search for her murderer concentrates particularly on a local businessman and thereby delves into the basic human issues of alienation, loneliness, aging, and death. Through a sensitivity to such human concerns and acute observations of the natural world, the author illustrates the relationship between the fluctuating faces of nature and the changing fortunes of human beings. Exacerbating Pratt's isolation from his fellow men is the ethnic animosity between the Austrians and the Slovenes to which he is subject from both sides. As an Austrian having spent his childhood in Slovenia, he is fully accepted in neither land; his fate anticipates that of many inhabitants of the provinces of the former Yugoslavia, who, in a far more ruthless way, became the victims of ethnic cleansing at the end of the twentieth century.