"I am now beginning the 'journey beyond', which I hope to be able to complete." Gerhard Roth, in May 2021
When Gerhard Roth died on 8 February 2022, his new book was about two-thirds finished - in a handwritten version in his notebooks. It is a journey through the realm of the dead that the narrator Franz Lindner undertakes when he deceases. The journey leads through Egypt, a country Gerhard Roth has travelled to time and again. There, in the purgatory of Cairo, the city of the dead, Franz Lindner encounters a wealth of real-life figures - above all artists who were important to Gerhard Roth in his life. His novel fragment is a great homage to these personalities and at the same time a final reflection on a man, his hopes, his creativity, his limits. And a self-portrait of the author who has reached the realm of freedom with this book - in which everything is possible.
"Gerhard Roth's literature is the most down-to-earth "cerebral literature" imaginable [...] perhaps the last great triumph of fantastic realism in the German language." - Oliver Jungen, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"It is the touching legacy of a great author." - Kronen Zeitung
"a great novel with which Gerhard Roth has surpassed himself." - Die Presse, Thomas Rothschild
"Two years after his death, the great Austrian novelist Gerhard Roth rules the literary summer with the breathtaking posthumous new publication Journey Beyond" - News, Heinz Sichrovsky
"A fantastic game with literature, philosophy and language." - 3sat Kulturzeit
