Since making his successful literary debut at the age of twenty-three, Gert F. Jonke has established a place for himself as a significant contributor to German-language experimental literature. Early in his career he found support for his creative endeavors in the Forum Stadtpark Graz, the enclave of the avant-garde in Austria, which from the time of its founding in 1960 served as the breeding ground for a diversity of progressive literary and artistic talents. During the Forum Stadtpark's first decade, while official recognition and government stipends were being awarded to the establishment writers who congregated mainly in Vienna, the works of the Graz group began to be published in the Federal Republic of Germany and Switzerland. Jonke, whose first novel was published in Frankfurt am Main, shares in the general tendency of the Austrian experimentalists to seek out reality within language and to view the literary text as an...