The feverhead

the long version

Wolfgang Bauer is best known in his native Austria as a playwright and director, and as the author of a single, oft-reprinted novel: The Feverhead, written in 1966. The Feverhead is written in the form of letters between a couple of not-at-all-bright Austrians. Their correspondence is doomed to failure, nearly every letter crosses in the post and yet they succeed in their quest: the search for a perfect thermometer (and a serial murderer). In fact they both independently discover the secret of the universe in a remote spot thousands of miles from their intended (and different) destinations. Bauer's comedy of errors is enacted by an unusual cast that includes microscopic schoolgirls, ambiguously sexed nuns, incompetent detectives, two ultimately bad poets, living steam engines and a venerable three-eyed sea-captain whose two bodies remain exactly 3.5 metres apart, not to mention: ULF.