(Find me at 50 Watts Books.)

Otto Gutfreund, Head, 1913-14. Collage on newspaper
from the amazing flickr photostream of calypsospots

He stared into the palm of his hand. He opened the sardine tin. He uncoiled the elastic bandage from his ankle. Slowly the drops of water ballooned outward from the end of the faucet. In the botanical atlas there was an image of a huge green plant, with green wrinkles, green skin, green flesh. When he fetched the bottle from the refrigerator, frost-drops rolled over the glass. The flowerbed, several meters wide, was already completely white. There, over the surface, the perfume froze. He turned the gas-knob on and held the match over the burner. He leafed through his book. His toes had reddened and swollen. Since the chairlegs were uneven, he teetered at every movement. He leaned forward, sliced the lemon and beheld the symmetry of its cross-section. He squeezed the lemon over the sardines. He coughed: his bronchial tubes contracted, the alveolae quivered in miniature convulsions, and the cough tumbled down the window and crackled on the landlady's eardrums.

--From The Will to Sickness (1973) by Gerhard Roth, trans. Tristram Wolff (Burning Deck, 2006)

Links for Roth, who has a surprising amount of material in English, including three books from Ariadne Press, publisher of many Austrian literary titans:

--bio from Literary Encyclopedia
--review of The Will to Sickness from Douglas Messerli at Green Integer Review
--McGonigle mentions Sebald on Roth
--Atlas page for Roth's Autobiography of Albert Einstein (out of print at the moment, so start with The Will to Sickness).
--Winterreise (FSG, 1980)
--Calm Ocean (Ariadne; I feel like I have an FSG hardback of this, but I can't find it so may have invented it)
--The Story of Darkness (Ariadne)
--The Lake (Ariadne)

Burning Deck's series of translations from the German looks amazing.

Apparently Roth's reputation in Austria has nothing to do with 70s work like Sickness and everything to do with Die Archive des Schweigens. ["This 'Archive of Silence,' which comprises a photographic anthology, a collection of essays, a biography, and four novels, is widely considered Roth's masterpiece."]