The Lime Works [1970/1986] – ★★★★

“I am interested only in “nonsense”; only in that which makes no practical sense. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestations.”Daniil Kharms

“The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.” Albert Camus

The Lime Works is a slowly suffocating narrative with a cobweb-like structure, inside which one can find both a spider (“monster”), Konrad, a man with peculiar obsessions, and its caught wrapped prey (“victim”), Konrad’s loyal, but disabled wife Zryd. Both have moved into a very expansive, but, paradoxically, also claustrophobic lime works in the town of Sicking, Austria, and have lived there in relative seclusion. Konrad’s sole purpose in life has revolved around his strange auditory experiments with which he pesters his wife incessantly so that his dream materialises – the finishing of his book titled The Sense of Hearing. He fantasises about the conclusion of this task even as he is still to write the book’s first sentence. Then comes the horrifying murder. What happened, and how the man with such abundant academic ambition living apparently peacefully could have gone so wrong? The writing, with its restlessness and peculiarly Bernhardian anxiety, crafts a tale of obsession, expectation and one quiet, horrifying descend into madness.

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