THE OTHER SIDE
by Alfred Kubin & translated by Mike Mitchell
A new translation of a phantasmagoric allegorical (1908) novel—the only one completed by the renowned Austrian expressionist graphic artist (1877–1959)—that has often been compared to Mervyn Peake’s fabulistic Gormenghast. It depicts its nameless narrator’s traumatic sojourn to a remote “Dream Realm” whose languorous calm is gradually destroyed by an outbreak of sleeping sickness, attacks by a “teeming multitude of animals,” and further derangements and catastrophes. Reminiscent as well of Witold Gombrowicz’s aggressively loopy psychodramas, The Other Side not only demolishes the very idea of Shangri-la; it may be a wry acknowledgement of the creative imagination’s perverse need for tension and trauma as stimulants. Blackly funny and boldly imagined, it’s an authentic modernist masterpiece.