Conversation of the Three Wayfarers

by Peter Weiss, John Keene (Introduction), E.B. Garside (Translator)

This fast-moving, tightly-wound, and gleefully dark novella contains an entire universe in miniature


Conversation of the Three Wayfarers is a tale overheard, rather than told directly. Abel, Babel, and Cabel, the wayfarers, carry on a three-sided monologue, each reporting curious incidents—the effect is of three capers rolled into a steeplechase performed on a floating pontoon. But are they really three distinct individuals? Why do their lives blend in such a fantastic manner? Weiss’s strikingly original prose has an impossibly contained quality, with each sentence doing a perfect double-double backflip before neatly landing. This essential rediscovered work, from the masterful and acclaimed German modernist Peter Weiss, will be a delightful discovery for readers of Kafka, Musil, and Gombrowicz.

Genres: Germany, German Literature

68 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Peter Ulrich Weiss was a German writer, painter, and artist of adopted Swedish nationality. He is particularly known for his play Marat/Sade and his novel The Aesthetics of Resistance.

Weiss' first art exhibition took place in 1936. His first produced play was Der Turm in 1950. In 1952 he joined the Swedish Experimental Film Studio, where he made films for several years. During this period, he also taught painting at Stockholm's People's University, and illustrated a Swedish edition of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. Until the early 1960s, Weiss also wrote prose. His work consists of short and intense novels with Kafkaesque details and feelings, often with autobiographical background. One of the most known films made by Peter Weiss is an experimental one, The Mirage (1959) and the second one - it is very seldom mentioned - is a film Weiss directed in Paris 1960 together with Barbro Boman, titled Play Girls or The Flamboyant Sex (Schwedische Mädchen in Paris or Verlockung in German). Among the short films by Weiss, The Studio of Doctor Faust (1956) shows the extremely strong link of Weiss to a German cultural background.

Weiss' best-known work is the play Marat/Sade (1963), first performed in West Berlin in 1964, which brought him widespread international attention. The following year, legendary director Peter Brook staged a famous production in New York City. It studies the power in society through two extreme and extremely different historical persons, Jean-Paul Marat, a brutal hero of the French Revolution, and the Marquis de Sade, for whom sadism was named. In Marat/Sade, Weiss uses a technique which, to quote from the play itself, speaks of the play within a play within itself: "Our play's chief aim has been to take to bits great propositions and their opposites, see how they work, and let them fight it out." The play is considered a classic, and is still performed, although less regularly.

Weiss was honored with the Charles Veillon Award, 1963; the Lessing Prize, 1965; the Heinrich Mann Prize, 1966; the Carl Albert Anderson Prize, 1967; the Thomas Dehler Prize, 1978; the Cologne Literature Prize, 1981; the Bremen Literature Prize, 1982; the De Nios Prize, 1982; the Swedish Theatre Critics Prize, 1982; and the Georg Büchner Prize, 1982.

A translation of Weiss' L'instruction (Die Ermittlung) was performed at London's Young Vic theater by a Rwandan company in November 2007. The production presented a dramatic contrast between the play's view on the Holocaust and the Rwandan actors' own experience with their nation's genocide.




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Reviews

[John Hatley · Rating 3 out of 5]

With his unique style, Peter Weiss conjures feelings of alienation, of helplessness. The three narrators relate anecdotes from memory and then correct/contradict themselves so that the reader is left confused and uncertain as to what really happened. This technique reflects reality in an unexpected way.

[Ashley T · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book felt exactly like a sequence of dream I might have had, and I enjoyed the novel symbolism. However, just like my dreams, the symbolic elements never really feel like they connect in a logical way. Thus my attention ebbed and flowed wildly despite this being such a tiny book.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

not like any conversation I've ever had! The drama here is in the mystery of the refracted poetics, where every section seems to be a new narrator and the only binding feature is the repetition of certain elements: a bridge, a ferryman and his sons, and the ferry. I do love the ferryman's sons names, which remind me of Beckett: Jam, Jem, Jim, Jom, Jum, and Jym. Not as strong as other Weiss I've read, the obscurantist mode overtaking all else here, but i can't deny he's a writer i love spending time with.

[Alan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This charming little book caught my eye in my local public library. The author turns out to be a celebrated German playwright, but this little book is neither a play nor a novel. It purports to capture a 3-way dialogue (trialogue?) between 3 travelers walking together, each of whom tells what are in effect very short stories. However, the stories seem not to be connected with each other, and many also lack internal coherence. They are mostly dark and yet whimsical, often combining the pedestrian with the fantastical. Each mini-story could conceivably be treated as a fable or a prose poem. I was happy to treat them as such, but for this purpose the language ought to be equally whimsical and fantastical. Unfortunately, the language (at least of this English translation) do not meet the task. Though the book is very very short, it was a minor labor to finish it.

[✿⁠ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars
If Weiss’s earlier works reflect a Modernist approach to form, time, and other elements of fiction, 'Conversation of the Three Wayfarers' anticipates the postmodern in its abrupt shifts between contemporaneity—with mentions of fluorescent lights, traffic, and factory buildings—and its dreamlike elision of chronological time or any fixed locations at all. One way to understand Weiss’s storytelling here is to view it as a roundabout way of describing a Germany, and a Europe for that matter, after the upheavals of various world wars (particularly World War II), the Holocaust, and the capitalist onslaught that followed.

[Differengenera · Rating 4 out of 5]

very reminiscent of Beckett's transitional prose works like Mercier and Camier, the quadrilogy of novellas before Molloy. surreal, occasionally amusing but poignant internal monologues from meandering down-and-outs who don't scan as human beings. perfectly competent in this regard, but inevitably minor, because everything that isn't the Aesthetics of Resistance looks minor by comparison, especially the stuff this guy wrote. thanks to New Directions for publishing this, please do his Vietnam play next

[Heidi]

Alkuasetelma: kolme miestä Abel, Babel ja Cabel tapaavat satunnaisesti ja alkavat kulkea kulkea kulkea ja keskustella paitsi keskustelu on oikeastaan monologin kunnes puhe katkeaa ja seuraava kolmikosta puhui oman pätkän. Puheet eivät suoraan liity toisiinsa. Ne ovat muistojen oloisia, mutta lukija ei voi olla varma. Puheenporinan kronologiakin voi heitellä. Mukana myös absurdeja elementtejä. Kirjassa ei tapahdu mitään muuta kuin kolme miestä puhuu.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like a conversation with my grandma

[Puurojohannes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Suomeksi siis luin... Palaan varmasti tähän vielä. Ehkä sitten kun tuntuu siltä, että on myös aika palata Kalevi Seilosen Proosaan.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sort of like the fables of Kafka and Calvino but without any of their lucidity, purpose, wisdom. I enjoy the mode it's in but it's too nonsensical

[emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

read this in the park and an ant was crawling all over it which was infinitely more interesting than what was actually going on in the book

[Zweifel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Der Fährmann nannte mir auch Namen, vielleicht waren dies Namen der Söhne, und so hieß der erste Jam, der zweite Jem, der dritte Jim, der vierte Jom, der fünfte Jum, der sechste Jym.