Meine Sprache und ich, wir reden nicht miteinander, wir haben uns nichts zu sagen.

This was Aichinger's second collection of "stories" (Erzählungen), but you shouldn't expect actual narratives. They are surreal, dream-like flights of fancy, in which words, most of them very concrete, often domestic or agricultural in range, seem to be chosen with a calculated randomness so that sentences make short-range sense but fight against every attempt our minds make to impose some kind of long-range order or message or symbolism onto them. There are giants, like the milkmaid of St Louis, and dwarves, like the infantry who accompany Diogenes on his journey; there is a gigantic fan in the title story; there are hares who decide after living for many generations in the sandy bay of Port Sing to mount an expedition to the (unexplained and inexplicable) Sacred Mountain, and so on. Random travel seems to be a recurrent theme: a farmer in search of weather proverbs sails from Brittany to Western Scotland, goes thence by rocket to Utah, and ends up by the sacred river in Mecca. But there are theories, the narrator points out, that Mecca is not on a sacred river. Tell that to the crocodiles.

In the late story "Meine Sprache und ich", the narrator's language becomes a character in her own right, the two of them are travelling over various frontiers together, and it is the language, not the narrator, who appears suspect to the border guards. Aichinger seems to have had a deep-rooted and growing distrust for language herself, and she constantly feels the need to challenge assumptions about words and their meanings and associations. The stories are wonderfully disorienting and disturbing, but it doesn't do to read too many at once, or you end up like a visitor to a giant gallery of abstract art... ( )