The Austrian writer Arno Geiger, an award-winning best-selling author with a large following, has written an autobiographical book and called it "The Happy Secret".

But actually "Sex, Lies and Waste Paper" would have been more appropriate: Geiger tells of his love life as a writer between women - and of that in Vienna's waste paper containers.

That's what the "happy secret" from the title is all about: Since his student days, Geiger has regularly climbed into the trash and found and taken other people's books, art, diaries and correspondence.

Now he is eloquently revealing this “secret”.

Tobias Ruether

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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Geiger kept and read the books – or sold them.

Mostly at flea markets, three times a year.

He brings more valuable books and art (once he finds lithographed postcards from the Wiener Werkstätten) to the auction house.

What Geiger takes out of the containers seems to have financed his life while he was writing his first manuscripts, an unpublished author in a small Viennese apartment with a toilet on the stairs.

But even after Geiger had found a publisher to publish his books, and even after the big breakthrough with the novel Es geht uns gut, for which he received the German Book Prize in 2005, he didn't stop: sat up early in the morning Bike and rode from container to container, sometimes found something, sometimes found nothing and meanwhile kept writing.

So he became prominent, wrote a book about his father with Alzheimer's disease, lost his father, got married, continued to write, helped his mother back to life when she suffered a stroke, and kept getting into the waste paper: even when he was enjoying the "pecuniary benefits “ (O-Ton Geiger) actually didn’t need it anymore.

Because at some point the container apparently became something else for the writer.

And that also explains the highly applied tone of confession in the new book: Geiger claims that from the discarded diaries and correspondence, he gathered a knowledge of human nature that flowed into the stories of his novels.

He is said to be ashamed of his “dives” in the garbage, which he finds inappropriate – although at the same time he describes himself as a free spirit who should be above such social judgments.

But at the same time Geiger is hardly ashamed of having invaded other people's private lives, even if these other people no longer wanted anything to do with this private life, otherwise they wouldn't have thrown their letters and diaries in the waste paper.

A double life that wasn't one

Apparently no one around Geiger really knew about these "rounds" except the women he was with - and he's with so many women and he has sex as much as he mentions having it every ten days Geiger the extra.

So now he's telling the story of his "double life," as he calls it.

But that's not it at all: a double life, and this imprecise choice of words is not the only one in this book.

In the course of the book, it turns out that containerization and writing are inseparable in the life of the Austrian writer Arno Geiger.

That is exactly why he is ultimately writing this book: to show that in Arno Geiger's work one would be unthinkable without the other.

For example, here he is at the manuscript of the novel that will make him famous