The Truth About Sascha Knisch

Jan 14, 2025 11:47 PM

Author:Aris Fioretos

'My name is Knisch, Sascha Knisch, and six days ago my life was in perfect order.'

Knisch, who works as a projectionist at the Apollo movie theatre, is a person with special sexual habits. One night, he sees the enigmatic Dora Wilms. A week later, she is dead and Knisch is charged with murder. As he tries to clear his name, he discovers a scientific conspiracy and is drawn into the rich tangle of a story in which nothing is as it seems. How can he prove what didn't happen? What goes on at the Foundation for Sexual Research? And why is it important to have testicles?

A biological thriller set in the steamy underworlds of Weimar Berlin in the sweltering summer of 1928, The Truth about Sascha Knisch deals with the so-called 'sexual question', its lures and seductiveness, dangers and temptations, but also with the shrewd passion between two young people in a Germany at the brink of disaster.

Reviews

In this noir-ish novel of 1928 Berlin, Aris Fioretos serves up an intoxicating brew distilled of equal parts murder mystery, sexological rumination, and historical farce

—— Jeffrey Eugenides

Fioretos has many similarities to Vladimir Nabokov... His prose style is playful, attentive and deft... By the end of this novel, the truth about Sascha Knisch may remain uncertain, but the formidable qualities of his creator have been well established

—— Times Literary Supplement

A stylish, intelligent and eerily entertaining novel

—— Independent on Sunday

This incredible novel about a young man's odyssey through the sexual underground of Weimar Germany is either a comic tragedy or a tragic comedy, and it is Aris Fioretos' great achievement to keep you guessing past the last page. The Truth about Sascha Knisch is worldly, audacious, haunting in its candour and unremittingly disturbing in its prescience. Fioretos is without a doubt one of Europe's most gifted writers

—— Jane Kramer

A masterpiece

—— Frankfurter Rundschau

It's possible to imagine Edgar Allan Poe enjoying The Poe Shadow

—— Mark Lawson , Guardian

This is a book full of surprising discoveries and reversals, but also a fascinating portrait of a society closer to fracture than anyone is prepared to admit...One of the novel's strength's is that it values intelligence, and the process of analytic thought as much as it does the sensational moments

—— Roz Kaveney , Independent

Pearl's is an ambitious project; literary criticism, biography, reconstruction, reportage and fiction, all in one volume...Where else could you find all this and disquisitions on the slave trade, voter fraud in local elections and the workings of the US postal system? And the truth about Edgar Allan Poe's death?

—— Nicola Smyth , Independent on Sunday

Fascinating reading

—— The Times

This is a story not for people who like reading novels but for the much larger number who like solving puzzles

—— Sunday Telegraph

Bruen's tightly coiled prose strikes like a piss-soaked rattler.

—— Capital

Sharp, punch and unsettling, Priest is a masterpiece.

—— Peterborough Evening Telegraph

... An intensely dark maelstrom ... excellent.

—— www.marymartin.com.au

Bruen should be valued as one of the most challenging and memorable writers in the genre at the moment.

—— www.reviewingtheevidence.com

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