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Zsuzsanna Gahse. Passepartout. Klagenfurt, Austria. Wieser. 1994. 108 pages, ill. DM 33. ISBN 3-851-29132-8.
The collection of prose poems Passepartout functions as a master key opening doors on seemingly insignificant people and places that gain importance through the narrator's simple yet often startling monosyllabic language. The notion of a "passe-partout"--the title of the first section and first story, as well as of the volume itself--provides a frame in which Zsuzsanna Gahse's stories are inserted like images through a loose backing.
In "The Bear Inside Me" Gahse changes into a clown and a bear and, through the power of words, turns a wall into a landscape. She shows the unreality of real laughter that a clown can produce and the reality of a bear being human. She fits key words of other languages...