Young Hans arrives with one suitcase in a squalid village on the eastern edge of empire-a surreal postwar Austria. His uncle has died, and according to the tradition required by his people-the Bieresch-Hans must assume his uncle’s place for one year. In a series of interactions with the village’s tragicomic characters and their contradictory stories and scriptures, the reluctant Hans must face a world both familiar and alien.

Among the Bieresch is Hans’s story-one of bizarre customs, tangled relationships, and the struggle between two mystical sects. The novel, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, is a German cult favorite and a masterwork of culture shock fiction that revels in exploring oppressive cultural baggage and assimilation. Readers will encounter here an amalgam drawing from Kafka, Borges, and Beckett, among others, combining to make Klaus Hoffer’s novel a world utterly its own.

One of the few works that will loom from the dust of this century one day. -Urs Widmer