In this book, which seems to compare the homeland of author Jeff Schinker with the multilingual situation in the Tower of Babel, the author confronts readers with the excesses and perversions in the sphere of labor and interpersonal relations in the neoliberal world.
The images of the unemployed, fraudsters, intellectuals, and bureaucrats blur in the nebula of reality, in which truth and fiction are firmly glued together. Alternating between the four languages, sixteen characters, drawn into this reality and realizing its absurdity, sabotage their lives and the lives of others and experience episodes in which everyone will discover that they are out of place.
“Sabotage” is a book of experiments, an unusual, extraordinary, eccentric, extravagant book, intended for lovers of experimental writing and for those who want to know – after all the anti-novels, non-novels, post-novels, and other inventions of the writer’s imagination – how one can still write.
This project has been funded with support from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Commission.
Jeff Schinker, born in 1985 in Luxembourg, is a writer and journalist. He studied in Paris, where he obtained a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature. Since 2017 he’s been working as editor of the cultural pages of the Luxembourg daily newspaper Tageblatt.
In 2015, Jeff Schinker published Retrouvailles, a novella about a protagonist who organises and simultaneously describes a meeting among old friends. While this task seems at first superficial and banal, eventually uncomfortable truths are revealed.
Sabotage, Schinker’s second book, is a collection of stories in French, Luxembourgish, English and German that confront its protagonists with the excesses and perversions of the world of work and relationships in a neoliberal society. It was published in 2018 and shortlisted for the Servais Prize for Literature, the Lëtzebuerger Buchpräis and the European Prize for Literature.
Schinker’s most recent novel Ma vie sous les tentes was published in October 2021 and shortlisted for the Servais Prize for Literature in 2022.
Jeff Schinker has also written several plays. His most recent one, Bouneschlupp, addresses racism in Luxembourg. In 2016, Jeff Schinker was the laureate of the writer’s residency at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin for which he has also been selected in 2023.
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