About Ror Wolf

Reviews

»Seldom in German literature has the seemingly solid ground of traditional narrative been so tenderly, earthshakingly shattered.«
Rolf Michaelis, Die Zeit

»How dissimulation relates to knowledge requires urgent investigation by Raoul Tranchirer. The ‘world-explainer to the fearless’ would have to explain at length to readers of the encyclopaedia he himself wrote, how it is that true knowledge of the world can be gained from a work of art which plays so slyly with marked reality cards as do the texts of Ror Wolf.«
Florian Balke, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Ror Wolf is a Hieronymus Bosch of story-telling and Tranchirer’s Lexicon is his “Garden of Pleasu-res”. (...) The style of the text draws on late 19th encyclopaedias intended for a middle class rea-dership or domestic how-to books of the same period, that is from a time when there was still an optimistic belief in mankind’s steady progress towards a comprehensive scientific explanation of the world. It’s the popular version of this theory that Wolf undermines and deconstructs. He tears off the covers of the encyclopaedia, lets the individual parts simply lie there like the plucked prey of his thoughts, interrupts the pontificating flow, and between the cracks the uncanny wells up.
(...) Ror Wolf, one of the most idiosyncratic figures of experimental literature, is able like no other to lull the listener with the appearance of respectable middle-class and academic probity, but then to deprive him of the possibility of consistent behaviour and logic, torpedoing his sense of reality, and even causing him to experience the loss as a pleasure. To the delight of the audience Wolf systematically interrupts trains of thought, denying and breaking up the plot.«
Best Radio Play 2007 - German Academy of Performing Arts, Jury statement

»In his prose, his poetry and his word and sound collages Ror Wolf inimitably combines linguistic artistry and grotesque comedy with a terse and compassionate perception of reality and its funda-mental constants, fear and hope, pleasure and decay. He is a master of the cryptic and utopian play with the primal matter of poetry.«
Friedrich Hölderlin Award, Jury statement

»What would the world be without Ror Wolf (…) Wolf’s worlds are often as unsettling as those collages Max Ernst assembled from elements at once familiar, arbitrary and terrifying (...) Rarely has the puzzling been so entertaining.«
Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung