Atlas of an Anxious Man

Christoph Ransmayr

Christoph Ransmayr (born 20 March 1954) is an Austrian writer. Born in Wels, Upper Austria Ransmayr grew up in Roitham near Gmunden and the Traunsee. From 1972 to 1978 he studied philosophy and ethnology in Vienna. He worked there as cultural editor for the newspaper Extrablatt from 1978 to 1982, also publishing articles and essays in GEO, TransAtlantik and Merian. After his novel Die letzte Welt was published in 1988 he did extensive traveling in Ireland, Asia, North and South America. In his works, too, he tells of his attitude towards life as a tourist and counts ignorance, speechlessness, light luggage, curiosity or at least the willingness not only to judge the world, but to experience it, to the prerequisites of writing. In 1994 he moved to West Cork, Ireland, as a friend offered to lease him a splendid house on the Atlantic coast for a very affordable rent. In his prose, Ransmayr combines historical facts with fictions. His novels are also characterized by the portrayal of cross-border experiences and the literary treatment of historical events and their connection or break with moments from the present. The combination of exciting plots and demanding forms in his first two novels earned him a lot of praise, which resulted in a great deal of attention in literary studies and numerous literary prizes. Ransmayr achieved great international success with his rewrite of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the novel The Last World (1988). The title of his novel Morbus Kitahara (1995) alludes to an eye disease of the same name, which leads to an increasing narrowing of the field of vision. It is a metaphor for a moral defect that afflicts the main characters, survivors of World War II, in a devastated no man's land.