Publisher's Synopsis
"Tigor is an adventure novel, the minute details of which read real to the extremeóthey appear as though they had been seen, touched, smelled, and tasted by the author himself. The reading offers a sheer delight."
-Peter Handke
"This novel is spectacularly successful in making sense of the beguiling and the contrary, in investigating and accommodating the mess of the modern world."
- The Times Literary Supplement
"It is encouraging, in what seems an increasingly anti-intellectual world, to find a novel which, while making no apology for its own cleverness, wears its learning so lightly. A fitting homage to Beckett, one feels."
- The Times of London
"Jungk has created a Quixote of deep and heartbreaking humanity, whose terrible end shows up not the emptiness of belief but the savagery of ignorance."
- The Independent
Giacopo Tigor, the unassuming hero of Peter Stephan Jungkìs novel, is a professor of mathematics, a proponent of Euclidian geometry reeling from a succession of intellectual defeats sustained at the hands of the advocates of chaos theory. Returning to his native city of Trieste for a conference, Tigor finds he is no longer able to face the banal constraints of the life he has made, and so he goes AWOL-first to Paris, where he fulfills a boyhood dream to work in the Odéon Theater as a stagehand. There he experiences a vision of Mount Ararat, holy mountain of the Armenian people, the landing point of Noah's Ark. His vision drives him onward to the East, where his flight evolves into a questóto find the remains of the Ark.
Tigor is an inspired marriage of the mysterious and the seemingly mundane, of gentleness and drama, order and chaos. This utterly singular work reimagines the novel form, and lingers in the readerìs mind long after it has been set aside.
