The serf

the long version

Joser Winkler's The Serf belongs to a genre which has made a significant contribution to Austrian literature over the last twenty-five years, the Anti-Heimatroman, novels which attack the conventional, idyllic view of rural life and reveal the restrictions and repressions of an impoverished and authoritarian society. The hero is a writer who has returned to the hell from which he thought he had escaped. Writing is an addiction, and he needs the stimulus of his family and native village to feed his addiction. His ability to express himself liberates him from the mute acceptance of the status quo, which is the fate of most of the villagers. It also makes him an outsider, as does his homosexuality, which is seen as a stigma in this very conservative rural society, where attitudes from the Nazi past are often still there just below the surface. Through the intensity of his language, which is violent, obscence, blasphemous, but also vivid baroque, fantastic, Winkler turns this picture of a backward rural community into a dark account of the human condition, in which we are all serfs to Death.