THE EXAMINATION

First edition, first printing. Original orange cloth lettered in black to the spine. Lacking the dustwrapper. A better than very good copy, the binding square and firm, the contents bright and clean throughout. Previous owner's bookplate affixed to the front pastedown. Lightly faded to the spine, the cloth showing a few spots and surface marks. A few light spots to fore- and upper edges of the page block. A clean, sound copy of an uncommon volume.

Translated from the original German by F. A. Voigt. Fredrich Torberg (1908-1979; his real surname was Kantor) was active in the Prague and Viennese literary world during 1920s and 1930s, where he counted Karl Kraus, Franz Werfel, Robert Musil, and Hermann Broch among his friends. 'The Examination', Torberg's first novel, and seemingly the sole work of his to be translated into English tells the story of the eighteen-year old Kurt Gerber, persecuted during his final year at school by a sadistic maths teacher. The book was partly prompted by the author's own experiences taking his final school-leaving examination, but also by the suicides of ten students during a single week in the winter of 1929. Torberg was encouraged to send the novel to a publisher by Franz Kafka's famous confidant, Max Brod.