Clemens Setz, the first Austrian to take part in this year’s competition, read from Daniela Strigl's text "The Scales" at her invitation. For the first time in this morning’s reading competition, the jury was unanimous in its praise praise.

“There’s a weirdo in every competition”

For Klaus Nüchtern, it is a text about the “fundamental horror of being measured". “There’s a weirdo in every competition – this one is delicately neurotic, but at the end there is potential".  I found the tremendously funny horror story about the human fear of drifting and giving one’s doctor false information - for example, about too high liver counts – very enjoyable.

An “incredibly entertaining” text.

Usula März adopted the same positive view and said, “I was snorting for laughter during the reading”. It is a story in which the world of artefacts comes to life and snatches at humans. “I thought the text, although quite awkward, was tremendously entertaining", said März in summary.

Ijoma Mangold thought she had found a good example “for comedy itself” in the text, because the characters were always tripping over their own bodies.

Sulzer: “The text is a contradiction in itself”

Alain Claude Sulzer did not share the positive views of his colleagues. Although the author had now managed to convince him about the “false pictures” with his reading skills, the text still contradicted itself far too often. Despite this, he agreed that the text contained "convincing dialogues".

Andre Vladimir Heinz thought, “The pitfall of the artefacts has been overcome very well”. The jury member, however, found the gist of the text incomprehensible. He did not understand why “young, cute men” always had to describe neurotic married couples in literature. Although the text describes its "backyard romance very well at a micro-technical level”, the ”parentheses” of the story does not automatically work for him.

Spinnen was also not totally convinced by the text: Although in maths one is of course pleased if the equation works out, in literature  "things are slightly different". One knows too much of the text to want to continue.

Strigle concluded that the text had “many plus points”.

“Not taking into account the stylistic errors, I thought the text was very funny”, concluded Daniela Strigl and subsequently praised the "brilliant short story in which plenty of obscureness” remained. Besides, one could not blame the author for being a mathematician. All in all, it is a “dangerous affair" in which, even in the end,  one remains ignorant because the fear of the protagonist is not explained. “The text has many plus points”, praised Strigl.

Text by Clemens J. Setz