Ulrich Becher - With this voluminous novel, akin in its meticulous construction to the works of the old masters, Becher has written his magnum opus: An inventive and fact-laden read with strong characters, in which recent history is mixed with fictitious fates to produce an exemplary story

Ulrich Becher, The Woodchuck Hunt. Crown Publishers, 1977.

March 1938: The Viennese journalist Albert Trebla, fight- er pilot in the First World War, flees from Nazi-occupied Austria to neutral Switzerland. But for the persecuted there is no refuge in the Swiss Alps and he feels threaten- ed by a series of mysterious deaths. Like a groundhog Trebla tries to look for cover, but wherever he is he gets entangled in absurdity.
With MURMELJAGD one of the great German novels  becomes available again – a parable of a mad, disturbing time; about delusion and peril, flight and expulsion and a life in exile.

Published abroad in 1969, this murky, fitfully vivid psycho-memoir is billed as a ""best seller in Europe""--which suggests that Europeans have either an insatiable appetite for Naziana or an unlimited tolerance for suspense laden with baroque impedimenta. It's 1938, and ""Uncle"" Adolf's Austrian anschluss has sent anti-fascists, like writer Trebla and Jewish wife Xana, scurrying into the nearby resort-y region around St. Moritz. Though befriended by locals, Trebla tells us that he is not happy: he's convinced that Nazi agents are pursuing him--the ""Two Blonds"" appear wherever he goes; he hears horrible screams from a glacier; he sees a ghostly ""Light in the Lake."" And violent deaths--a car driven off a pier, a soldier's gun-in-mouth suicide--crop up around him as he wanders from town to town, house to house. Are all these just ""Hallucinations of a ruined Austrian Marxist?"" Perhaps, but the news from home, which Trebla hears when he helps a talkative resistance group smuggle in a political refugee, is traumatically real: Xana's father, a renowned circus clown-on-horseback, has died theatrically in Dachau. Energized by outrage, Trebla sets out to stalk the assassins--""in the name of all the hunted animals I was out to get the hunters""--and crosses a mountain on foot, meeting memories, apparitions, Freud--but not much action. ""Trebla, world's last living Social Democrat! See him marching down the road alone!"" Also hear him talking to a large number of Austrians, Swiss, and Italians whose dialects have been translated into barely readable, unpronounceable alphabet glops: ""Yeah-no-o, now I've hhadh e-nufff!"" But, if Becher's comic-dialogue rhythms got lost in translation, his sporadically intriguing imaginings were lost from the start--in an earnest, endless fog of inconclusive incidents and uncoordinated ironies.  - Kirkus Reviews

»This book, once you’ve fallen for it, becomes a life-long drug. It is like a space ship, capable of leaving time and space, departing into the oddest, most hilarious and menacing realms. It is one of those very rare books that seize you with almost physical violence, make you hear, smell, taste, suffer their story.« Eva Menasse

»Our man for the refined and burlesque narrative. Becher’s biggest, best novel approaches the drama of exile with wit.« - Maxim Biller

»Readers will breathlessly follow this dark age novel, thanks to the eminent wit, self-mockery and deep black humour of this narrator. It features delightfully eccentric characters and scenes of grotesque folly.« - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Becher’s magnum opus stands for everything that characterizes this author’s work: His wit of language, his talent for word creation, his power of observation and literary dissection.« -
Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

»The book of the year 2011 certainly is Ulrich Becher’s MURMELJAGD. I have not read such a brilliant book for years.« - Juli Zeh

»With this voluminous novel, akin in its meticulous construction to the works of the old masters, Ulrich Becher has written his magnum opus: An inventive and fact-laden read with strong characters, in which recent history is mixed with fictitious fates to produce an exemplary story.« - SPIEGEL

»Is it permitted to laugh about the horrors of national socialism? As for the cast of Ulrich Becher’s narrative, they do, piercingly and extensively, like a reflex. MURMELJAGD is a turbulent, dizzying struggle of words, and the novel of a lifetime.« - Frankfurter Rundschau

»Where is there a German storyteller today whom one can charge with an overabundance of reality? Are they not more often a bit thin-blooded, too reflective, somewhat meager in their passion? Becher’s unique position consists in being the opposite pole.« - Süddeutsche Zeitung

»A masterpiece. (...) In an oceanic narrative flow, Becher captures the horrors of the era with linguistic folly, he interlinks life stories with irony and fantasy, and at the same time tells a love story that is as subtle as it is refined.« - Tages-Anzeiger

»The novel alternates between a surprising crime story, a novel of marriage and psychological analysis, and a sweeping work of memoir that, notwithstanding its humurous undertone, keeps its focus on the issue of facism.«  - Aargauer Zeitung

»Becher is a sharp-tongued storyteller, a moralizing tale-spinner. (...) His changing of themes is downright virtuoso - from biting satire to comedic-grotesque dialogue.« - Augsburger Allgemeine