THE AUSTRIAN WRITER Peter Rosei was born in Vienna in 1946. In 1968 he was awarded the Doctor of Law degree at the University of Vienna. After completing military service he worked as private secretary to the painter Ernst Fuchs and later directed a textbook publishing house. Since 1972 he has been a freelance writer, residing near Salzburg and, presently, in Vienna.

Peter Rosei's early collection of narrative prose Wege contains these reflections on the seemingly prosaic phenomenon of “unterwegs sein,” of going or moving, the simple negation of standing still: “Opinions on going can differ. While some claim to be constantly leaving various places, others say they are always on the way to various places. These two views of the nature of going premise a tie, the one a tie with the past, the other a tie with the future. But there is still a third manner of going, that is: simply to be on the way, from Nowhere to Nowhere, going for the sake of going. This manner of going, too, has an underlying intent. It can be summed up by saying that motion, even if purposeless and senseless, is preferable to standing still.”

From the start of his literary career to the present, motion (going, traveling, moving) has permeated Rosei's fiction. Its thematic prominence is reflected in the titles of his books, from the first, Landstriche (1972) and Wege (1974), to the more recent Von hier nach dort (1978) and Reise ohne Ende (1983). The early works depict an agonized going amidst somber, threatening landscapes whose portrayals are doubly imposing: in the vivid evocation of their physical presence as well as the force with which they conjure nature's hostility to the values and meanings that render life humane. Rosei's landscapes abound in decay, violence, and misery. They resist cultivation and are sparsely peopled. (A book of his “middle” period bears the half-title Entwurf für eine Welt ohne Menschen (1975). Those who trudge and labor in their barren, forbidding spaces are, in the main, abject creatures, amoral and prone to cruelty and violence. The wanderer's going is aimless, an ordeal without meaning.

In later works — Wer war Edgar Allan? (1977), Von hier nach dort (1978), and Das schnelle Glück (1980) — the journey goes on without goal or sense, but it has become markedly subjectivized.