Laufhaus

Alfred Kovalski is a pianist and a basement hermit in Viennas tenth district. When he sets out to look for Nadia, his search leads him through the Laufhäuser of Austria and into a story that reaches back to Alexander Scriabins Moscow. Laufhaus, the first novel by Georg F. Weidinger, first published in German in 2019, is a book about music, longing and inheritance, and it is built like a sonata.A word on the title for readers outside the German-speaking world: a Laufhaus is a particular kind of brothel found in Austria and Germany, a building of rented rooms along corridors through which visitors walk freely. It is in these discreet, anonymous corridors that Alfred looks for Nadia, and it is there that the novel finds its unlikely stage.The novel follows the classical form of the sonata movement, and its four parts carry the names of that form: Exposition, Development, Recapitulation and Resonance. After a short Unison, the Exposition sets out its themes in a narrowing count of time Today, Three Months Ago, 88 Days Ago before a sudden leap to Moscow, 122 years ago. The Development widens the frame: the chronicle of the Kovalski family, a concert on 11 November 1983, Kerala in India in June 2011, and an enlightenment at four in the morning on 24 September 2019, in the basement of Hasengasse 31 in Viennas tenth district.In the Recapitulation the themes return, transformed, to the present to Laufhaus Eselsbauch and the days that follow and the final part, Resonance, lets them sound on, four months later. Like a piece of music, the book works with motifs, returns and variations, bringing together places and times that seem far apart: the Vienna of today and the Moscow of Scriabin, a family history and a single night in a basement, the concert hall and the corridors of a Laufhaus. The novel closes with Book Music, the novels own musical coda.Georg F. Weidinger, born in Vienna, is a doctor of general medicine and Chinese medicine and the author of numerous specialist books on Traditional Chinese Medicine under his civil name, Georg Weidinger. For his fiction he adds an F. to his name F for Franz, his middle name, and F for fiction. His prose is musical and rhythmic, attentive to the city, to the body and to sound. Laufhaus is for readers of literary fiction who love Vienna, music and novels that dare to be formally ambitious, and for anyone drawn to stories about love, obsession and the long echoes of family history.