UW Press: Overheard

At home in a Vienna co-op

In his early thirties, Kurt Endlicher has finally settled down, with a steady job as a teacher and a small flat to call his own. But the walls are thin, and he and his neighbors can overhear every cough, footstep, and toilet flush. Initially annoyed by the intimacy, he gradually learns to appreciate the value of community and discovers the key to his own happiness.

Overheard is set in Vienna in the mid-2010s, a time of significant social change and political conflict, with tens of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees arriving and protests taking place over a café’s expulsion of two women who greeted each other with a kiss. Kurt is gay, but his best friend is not. He has a soft spot for the city’s newcomers as well as its longtime residents. He’s a sympathetic listener, leading him—and the reader—to revisit and reevaluate assumptions.

Originally published as Tür an Tür (literally “door-to-door” but more accurately “next-door neighbors”), Dominik Barta’s novel is a page-turner filled with humor, insight, and a suspenseful plot. Overheard combines visions of an idealized past and a longed-for future to create a present that we all want to inhabit.

Dominik Barta was born in Upper Austria and studied in Vienna, Bonn, and Florence. In addition to Tür an Tür, he published the award-winning Vom Land.

Gary Schmidt, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Wright State University, is the author of The Nazi Abduction of Ganymede: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Postwar German Literature, translator of The Summers, cotranslator of What Makes a Man: Sex Talk in Beirut and Berlin, and coeditor of Quertext: An Anthology of Queer Voices from German-Speaking Europe.

“Captivating and concise. . . . Barta gently puts his finger in the wound of many city dwellers and entertains us with his reflected humour.”
—the queer little review

“A touching little great novel that carries all its characters with great sympathy.”
—Frankfurter Neue Presse

“Warm and generous. Artful, but never artificial. In Barta’s novel empathy does not degenerate into a compulsory exercise. . . . ‘I feel the heartbeat in my head,’ it says. You feel it too when you read this book.”
—Kleine Zeitung

Of Related Interest
One Breath from Drowning Subtitle Kent Quaney	The Summers Subtitle Ronya Othmann Translated by Gary Schmidt