Karli's Vacation

"Karli's Vacation" is the journey of a gourmet through star restaurants. A middle aged man travels from one restaurant to another, enjoying foods and wines as if they were works of art. "Feichtinger" tells the story of a crazy woman who terrorizes her whole building with nightly banging and sexual cursing, until she finally kills a psychoanalyst who had been attempting to help her. In "The Erdheim Family Table" family members, both blood related and related by marriage meet between Christmas and New Year, fight, terrorize each other, and lead absurd conversations. "Sufisticated" is a short story about a meeting between the narrator and a university assistant who attempt to work on a translation together. This attempt fails, however, because the co-translator has fallen for Islam, and prefers to frequent a mosque and pray rather than work on the translation. The last story "The World Consists of Striking" also takes place at a university. It deals with intrigues, swaggering talk, senseless admiration, hatred and rivalry.