The Lamentations of Zeno: A Novel [Hardcover]

A literary fiction about climate disaster and a scientist imploding on a journey to the Antarctic

Zeno Hintermeier is a scientist working as a travel guide on an Antarctic cruise ship, encouraging the wealthy to marvel at the least explored continent and to open their eyes to its rapid degradation. It is a troubling turn in the life of an idealistic glaciologist. Now in his early sixties, Zeno bewails the loss of his beloved glaciers, the disintegration of his marriage, and the foundering of his increasingly irrelevant career. Troubled in conscience and goaded by the smug complacency of the passengers in his charge, he starts to plan a desperate gesture that will send a wake-up call to an overheating world.

The Lamentations of Zenois an extraordinary evocation of the fragile and majestic wonders to be found at a far corner of the globe, written by a novelist who is a renowned travel writer. Poignant and playful, the novel recalls the experimentation of high-modernist fiction without compromising a limpid sense of place or the pace of its narrative. It is a portrait of a man in extremis, a haunting and at times irreverent tale that approaches the greatest challenge of our age—perhaps of our entire history as a species—from an impassioned human angle.“The best thing one could say of an author: he enriches us.”
—Günter Grass

“My favorite book of the summer … short, sharp, bitter, and very funny.”
—Nicola Twilley,New Yorker

“Thrilling, nuanced, and chillingly meditative … Ilija Trojanow has written a modern fable tinged with absurd humor, dramatizing the high stakes of our current climate gamble.”
—Colum McCann, author ofLet the Great World Spin

“This is like the stream of consciousness of our planet’s unraveling lifeworld, as channeled through its melting ice and a cruise ship naturl3F