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by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Author)
In Friedrich Dürrenmatt's experimental thriller The Assignment, the wife of a psychiatrist has been raped and killed near a desert ruin in North Africa. Her husband hires a woman named F. to reconstruct the unsolved crime in a documentary film. F. is soon unwittingly thrust into a paranoid world of international espionage where everyone is watched-including the watchers. After discovering a recent photograph of the supposed murder victim happily reunited with her husband, F. becomes trapped in an apocalyptic landscape riddled with political intrigue, crimes of mistaken identity, and terrorism.
F.'s labyrinthine quest for the truth is Dürrenmatt's fictionalized warning against the dangers of a technologically advanced society that turns everyday life into one of constant scrutiny. Joel Agee's elegant translation will introduce a fresh generation of English-speaking readers to one of European literature's masters of language, suspense, and dystopia.
"A tour-de-force . . . mesmerizing."-Village Voice
Author Biography
Friedrich Dürrenmatt was born in 1921 in the village of Konolfingen, near Berne, Switzerland. He wrote prolifically during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, taking particular interest in human rights and the preservation of Israel. He is the author of numerous books published by the University of Chicago Press, including The Pledge.
Joel Agee has translated numerous German authors into English, including Heinrich von Kleist, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Elias Canetti. In 2005 he received the Modern Language Association's Lois Roth Award for his translation of Hans Erich Nossack's The End: Hamburg 1943.
Theodore Ziolkowski is the Class of 1900 Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is the author of many books, including The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises.
