The abbey

"The Abbey is a comic tour de force in the postmodernist mode, set in contemporary Austria. Although the ironic, idiosyncratic, and utterly irrepressible first-person narrator of Brandstetter's novel, the provincial Police Inspector Franz Einberger, would undoubtedly object vociferously to being placed in so modish a context. Einberger's tale ostensibly concerns the mysterious disappearance of the Arnulf Chalice, the ancient and irreplaceable emblem of the Abbey of Freimunster's foundation. It is this case that he has been called upon to investigate and report upon in detail to the Abbot, but his work as a detective, while in its own right interesting and remarkable, is only the pretext for a wide-ranging psychological and spiritual investigation of the condition of postwar Austria: its consumer society, its transformation of religion and history into tourism, and, most important, its failure to look itself squarely in the eye."--BOOK JACKET.