Another eight books finished this month, five by Women/POC.
- Alte Sorten — Ewald Arenz
- The Books of Jacob — Olga Tokarczuk
- Sieben leere Häuser — Samanta Schweblin
- Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? — Lev Parikian
- In Morningstar’s Shadow — Aliette de Bodard
- Dunkelblum — Eva Menasse
- die dinge, die ich denke, während ich höflich lächle | Synchronicity — Sharon Dodua Otoo
- You Should Come With Me Now — M. John Harrison
The Books of Jacob is huge. Almost a thousand pages, with a large cast and covering a fairly lengthy period of time, it still manages to keep the reader’s attention by focusing on a few central characters. The book is based on a true story, and clearly involved a lot of research into the period and place — a Poland very different from the modern state, essentially multicultural and stretching through what is now western Ukraine to borders with the Austrian and Turkish empires. The book itself is similarly diverse, part-epistolary, studded with uncaptioned illustrations Sebald-style, and, in simple but effective trick, with pages numbered in reverse. As well as being a nod to the Hebrew reading direction, the page-numbers counting down create an increasing sense of drama.
Dunkelblum has some interesting similarities: it’s set on the eastern border of Austria (“Dort hinten beginnt Asien, sagten die Dunkelblumer gern mit pathetischem Schaudern in Richtung Grenze, wir sind die letzten Ausläufer”); it covers events throughout the twentieth century; and as a “novel of a town” it has many characters (with a list of Dramatis Personae to help keep track). It’s an ensemble piece, choosing not to focus on any particular characters, but on the town as a whole. The sense of place is wonderful — another welcome appendix is a gloss of the Austriacisms which permeate the book. These appear primarily in the dialogue, but the border between this and the narration is fluid, with the latter taking the points of view and linguistic tics of the characters concerned. Hungary is usually “over there”: “Unterrichtet wurde übrigens auf Drüberisch, da man in Horkas erstem Lebensjahrzehnt noch zu Drüben gehörte.”
The people of Dunkelblum are portrayed with affection, despite the often dark subject matter, and there’s a Whisky Galore-type celebration of the patronised locals: “Jedes Land hat seine Ostfriesen, in Österreich sind es die Burgenländer.” One character’s memories of his mother are particularly well-drawn: “Jedes Mal, wenn sie ihn um etwas schickte, verlangte sie etwas Großes, auch wenn die jeweilige Sache gar nicht besonders groß war oder es nur ein einzelnes Stück davon gab. Aber so war es gewesen, das machte ihr Spaß, und wie lange hatte er nicht mehr daran gedacht. Kisfiam, die große Schere, die große Rolle Spagat, die große Schaufel, da drüben, sperr die Augen auf.”
There’s an additional lack of unity in the plotting: Menasse plays with the expectation that everything will be wrapped up in the end; an expectation which the characters at times share and discuss (“ich war mir sicher – da gibt es einen Schlüssel, einen Code. Und ich wollte ihn unbedingt finden – vielleicht bin ich der Einzige, der ihn finden kann?”). As in life, some things are connected, others aren’t, and some are just red herrings.
The novel seems to satirise the “cozy crime” genre so popular in Britain; it and the next book, Alte Sorten, can be seen as examples of a parallel German genre, the Dorfroman (while Dunkelblum is nominally a town, the number of characters does not obviously reflect that). Alte Sorten lacks the other novel’s humour, but it focuses tightly on the relationship between the two main characters: a woman running a farm on her own, and a teenage girl who comes to stay with her. It’s much more rural in tone, with the newcomer allowing for much description of agricultural practices which paints the picture well, if at the cost of some info-dumping. Over the course of a few weeks at the start of autumn, both characters do a lot of growing: “Die meisten Leute hatten vergessen, dass auch im Herbst Dinge wachsen konnten; und dass man mit ihnen vorsichtiger umgehen musste, als mit denen, die im Frühjahr kraftvoll aus der Erde schossen.”
Nature also dominates Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear?, a narrative of a big year by a very rusty bird-watcher. Like Simon Barnes, Parikian uses his poor birdwatching skills and humour to engage the naturally-challenged reader, but even the jokes smuggle in information (“a capercaillie, which sounds like a mixture of a ball going down a plughole and someone sanding a grasshopper”).
Sieben leere Häuser and die dinge, die ich denke, während ich höflich lächle | Synchronicity are both by adopted Berliners, and were both translations into German — the former has not yet appeared in English, but fortunately the German market is more receptive than some others to translated books! The stories are in a similar absurdist vein to A Mouthful of Birds. The Otoo book consists of two novellas which were originally written in English, but the German translation fits well with Berlin setting. Both unfold in interesting narrative techniques: the first reveals gradually deeper layers of the story as it goes back in time (chapters numbered in reverse, a la Tokarczuk!), while the second is divided into short chapters for the 24 days of advent.
In Morningstar’s Shadow is a group of three stories set in an alternate history of Paris; they provide brief, but welcome glimpses of the earlier lives of characters from de Bodard’s novel The House of Shattered Wings.
The last collection of stories, You Should Come With Me Now, is classic recent M. John Harrison. The stories range from poetic sketches of a page or less, to mid-length narratives which often include material which Harrison reworked later (in this case, in The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again). This creates a very Harrisonesque, enjoyably unsettling feeling in the reader.