Dancing Mad God

I finished a modest eight books this month, four from my month’s project of “finishing off”, one reread in Portuguese, a modest two in German, and five by women/POC. And since it’s the middle of the year, that makes a total of 57 books, 23 in German, 31 by women/POC, seven in Portuguese (though that includes rereads).

• Raízes do amanhã — Waldson Souza et al.
• Vernon Subutex 1 — Virginie Despentes, tr. Frank Wynne
• Kindheitsmuster — Christa Wolf
• Moon Palace — Paul Auster
• The First Wife — Paulina Chiziane, tr. David Brookshaw
• Rude Girl — Birgit Weyhe
• Thomas Cromwell — Diarmaid MacCulloch
• Alle Toten fliegen hoch: Amerika — Joachim Meyerhoff

As with The Seagull last month, I read Vernon Subutex 1 as preparation for a trip to the theatre. The comparison was fascinating: the play gained a lot from the experience of the performance, especially as music and cinema are central themes, while the novel includes a large narrative element sacrificed in the adaptation. In both, there’s a fine balance between tragedy and comedy.

One particular advantage of the performance of Vernon Subutex was that Vernon was played by Joachim Meyerhoff, who I’d also seen in The Seagull. I enjoyed seeing how he could play both characters in very similar ways, with a particularly good comic style to his voice and timing. Having found out that he also writes, I listened to his reading of the first part of his autobiographical sequence, Alle Toten fliegen hoch: Amerika. The same manner made it a pleasure to listen to, and again there’s a balance between the bulk of the story (comic tales from his year in Laramie, Wyoming) and a central tragedy.

Star book of the month was undoubtedly Kindheitsmuster. It’s a big book in every sense: page count (hence the need to finish it off this month), but also the themes of the Wolf-like protagonist’s childhood in Nazi-era eastern Germany, and the author’s return on a visit to what has become Poland in the 70s. The narrative conceit is that the child is always referred to in the third person, and the author in the second; the book cannot be completed until she manages to reconcile the two in the first. What could be a formal gimmick turns out to be extremely effective.

I started listening to Moon Palace when Paul Auster died, and though I liked the beginning very much, got distracted by other projects. There are similarities with Kindheitsmuster: strong parallels between the author and narrator, and a strong overall form. In this case the form is provided by various strokes of fate, which strike in Dickensian style, which I found rather alienating, but there are still plenty of wonderful things in the novel (the protagonist reading through his furniture made from crates of books, and the description of a trip to see a painting, in particular).

I’ve been reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s biography of Thomas Cromwell for more than a year — I unwisely chose to read it in the kindle app on my phone, which wasn’t conducive to getting immersed in it. In the meantime I’ve finished Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, which helped as a reference point as I reached the final stages of Cromwell’s career (normally it might go the other way). After the long struggle, once I’d started to make progress it all went much more smoothly. As a book, it wasn’t the easiest read — inevitably there’s a large cast involved, which was not easy to keep track of, though the author helpfully points out when we’ve met someone before. The occasional flashes of humour were also very welcome.

With the last finished-off book, we turn to Black and Portuguese writing: The First Wife is an engrossing story of polygamy in Mozambique. Chiziane’s style is very florid, with similes piled on similes — not completely my thing, but it certainly creates an effect. Some of the details of Mozambican marital culture were also eye-opening.

My Portuguese re-read — and first Portuguese audiobook — was Raízes do amanhã, a collection of Brazilian Afro-futurist stories. Not all great writing, but fun.

Finally, graphic novel of the month was Rude Girl, which was unlike anything I’d read before. Enclosed in a framing story of how Weyhe came to write the book is a fictionalised biography of a Caribbean girl in Chicago, who copes with racism, abuse and poverty while embracing literature and the skinhead movement and eventually moving to Germany. It’s intercut with her own reflections on Weyhe’s retelling — as told by Weyhe.

Coming up: I’m starting the second half of 2024 with Ireland, plus (hopefully) a Thomas Mann mini-project….

A short month, with just eight books completed, but I managed to squeeze in my four German, one Portuguese, one graphic novel and one reread. The theme: sci-fi!

• Melek + Ich — Lina Ehrentraut
• Expect Me Tomorrow — Christopher Priest
• Grenzwelten — Ursula K. Le Guin (Autor), tr. Karen Nölle
• The Book of All Loves — Agustín Fernández Mallo, tr. Thomas Bunstead
• Der letzte Europäer — Martina Clavadetscher
• Europe in Winter — Dave Hutchinson
• Eine unberührte Welt Band 1 — Andreas Eschbach
• Raízes do amanhã: 8 contos afrofuturistas — Waldson Souza et al.

The graphic novel, Melek + Ich, was a great discovery. The back cover promised romance, SF, double identities, queer relationships, and narcisissism, all of which it delivered on. The art style was suitably grungy in its dive bars and messy flats, while bringing out the character(s) of the protagonist(s) effectively. The SF element was extremely soft, but consciously and amusingly so (“I happen to have invented a portal to parallel worlds”-style).

Grenzwelten combines two of Le Guin’s Hainish cycle: 1972’s The Word for World is Forest (this part was a reread for me), and The Telling from 2000. Both have a tendency to didacticism, especially in their loving portrayal of the traditional cultures on the respective worlds, but there is enough depth to the characters to keep them engaging.

Der letzte Europäer is a short play about a dog and a protective robot tussling over the last European of the title. It’s in Clavadetscher’s typical sort-of-verse style, though I found it much more obscure than her Knochenlieder. Now that I have some idea what was going on, I’d like to reread it before too long and see how much further in I get.

My search for actual German SF prose took me down several blind alleys: Der grüne Planet (Kai Focke et al.) is a collection of climate fiction short stories, some good (one about a generation ship which lands on a planet abandoned after a climate catastrophe had a nice line in grim humour), some (climate denialist) bad enough for me to stop reading. I get enough both-sidesing from the media already. Vakuum (Phillip P. Peterson) wasn’t awful, but too conventional and middle of the road (especially in its portraya of women) for me to want to invest the time to finish it. I ended up with Eine unberührte Welt Band 1 from the reliable Andreas Eschbach: Swabian humour put to good satirical use, especially in the story about government bureaucracy taking over the literary world.

Expect Me Tomorrow was Christopher Priest’s own venture into climate fiction. That element of the story is skilfully addressed, combining clearness about the actual events with an appreciation of why it could have looked different at the time of one strand of the story (that being the early 20th century). The obligatory Priestian twins link it to a true-life crime story, via a very ropey SF element which the flat prose manages to make believable. A good book to say goodbye to Priest with.

The other English-language novel, Europe in Winter, was the main reason for my choice of the month’s topic. I’ve been reading the Fractured Europe sequence in slow motion over several years, but Europe in Winter didn’t fit in with any of my recent themes. Now it set the theme, and it was great to dive back in to the world. In each book Hutchinson seems to take the story at least 90 degrees from where it was before, but our friend Rudi is always there to be our guide. This time he also repeated a scene word for word from the first book, which was a bold move, but justified for the story and also for being a fantastic scene. I was a bit slow reading the book because I kept reading bits out to myself, which I take to be a good sign.

The Book of All Loves is another Fitzcarraldo book, and keeps up that publisher’s tradition of boundary-pushing/oddness. The book has alternating sections: a catalogue of loves is interspersed with delphic statements from a pair of post-apocalyptic lovers; then there follow parts of a narrative about pre-apocalyptic lovers in Venice. I found this much the most interesting (due to the presence of a story), while the other parts were reminiscent of the Calasso-esque Eurowhimsy which I find attractive for a few pages, but then don’t finish.

Finally, Raízes do amanhã is a collection of Afrofuturist stories; I’d hoped that some would be from Lusophone Africa, but they’re actually all Brazilian. Like Melek + Ich, the SF elements are disarmingly super-soft: the inhabitants of a favela build a space station; the narrator’s aunt builds a time-machine, etc. Another common element is that of “spiritual sci-fi” — lots of vibrations, reminiscent of Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argus books. My woo-ometer was tested at times, but there was enough variety for me to enjoy almost every story in the book.

Next month is another Lusophone month: a few books which will be covered by the Portuguese in Translation group this year, plus a graphic novel from Portugal and whatever else comes my way….

A good start to the year: I finished eleven books this month, six by women/POC, four in German, one in Portuguese — all according to plan. My project for the month was to read Fitzcarraldo authors (not necessarily Fitzcarraldo editions) — eight of the eleven were part of that. My other longer-term plan is to read Europe, or at least the EU — this time I covered:

• Germany
• Sweden
• Poland
• Italy
• France

and non-EU Norway and UK. (Accidentally all but one of the books are either translated or in languages other than English).

• Clemens Meyer über Christa Wolf — Clemens Meyer
• OpOs Reise — Esther Kinski
• The Singularity — Balsam Karam, tr. Saskia Vogel
• Anos de chumbo e outros contos — Chico Buarque
• Anna In — Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Lisa Palmes
• Die Geschichte der getrennten Wege — Elena Ferrante, tr. Karin Krieger
• The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild — Mathias Énard, tr. Frank Wynne
• What Have You Left Behind? — Bushra al-Maqtari, tr. Sawad Hussein
• Minor Detail — Adania Shibli, tr. Elisabeth Jaquette
• A Shining — Jon Fosse, tr. Damion Searls
• The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones — Neil Gaiman

Starting with the true Fitzcarraldi, The Singularity (by Kurdish Swede Balsam Karam) is just out, and is a perfect blend of content and form. The Prologue was somewhat off-putting — it doesn’t hold your hand by gently introducing you to the characters — but it establishes the link between the two protagonists who are respectively the focus of the first and third main sections, while the second is based on the intersection of their experiences. This part in particular uses formal innovation very effectively to show the connection between the two, while the anonymisation gives the book a universal significance.

The “Middle-eastern Women” sub-project continued with What Have You Left Behind? (Bushra al-Maqtari, Yemen). I started this a while ago, but had to read it in short stints; as the back cover says, it’s “As difficult to read as it is to put down”. It’s composed, Svetlana Alexievich-style, of testimonies from relatives of victims of the war in Yemen (now worsened by British and American bombing, which is one of the factors that prompted me to finish it). It’s absolutely remorseless: both sides in the conflict target civilians indiscriminately, and each testimony ends with the full names and ages (typically young) of the victims. While each victim’s story ends in much the same way, what stands out is the diversity of their lives before they were cut short. This humanisation of the victims makes the book worth reading despite the harrowing content.

Minor Detail (Adania Shibli, Palestine) again has links to current affairs: not only does it centre on war crimes in the foundation of Israel, Shibli was famously disinvited to receive a prize in Germany because of the political implications of her book (as misread by German critics). The first part details, in (again, the only word I can use) remorseless, flat prose, a war crime which took place in the Negev desert in 1949. The second is a first-person narration of a Palestinian women investigating the event, detailing the bureaucratic and violent effects of the apartheid system. The rhymes between the two stories create the book’s lasting impression that everything changes, while everything stays the same.

Returning to Europe, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild (Mathias Énard, France) is an entertaining beast of a novel: almost 500 pages, it centres (“focuses” is hardly the word) on an anthropologist who moves from Paris to western France to study the “natives”. Énard takes this as a starting point to tell the stories firstly of the local people, and (by reincarnation) the history of the area. The central banquet is particularly, and explicitly, Rabelaisian, and represents the book’s extreme of fantasy; the anthropologist’s own story is essentially realistic, but somewhat under-motivated. As with many other works from this otherwise great publisher, there are many proofreading errors, but they’re not such as to spoil the experience.

At the opposite end of pretty much every scale, A Shining (Jon Fosse, Norway) is barely even a novella, but focuses entirely on the perceptions of the protagonist. This ultra-subjectivity just about makes the spiritual experiences possible to swallow for the unreligious reader, but it’s not where I’d recommend starting with Fosse (that would be Aliss at the Fire, for a brief introduction).

Turning to non-Fitzcarraldo Fitzcarraldans in German: Clemens Meyer über Christa Wolf (Clemens Meyer, Germany) is a short, but dense subjective round-up of East German literature, through the medium of Meyer addressing a bust of Wolf at his desk. There were a lot of new names for me, which was an occasional impediment, but Meyer is able to draw brief, rounded portraits of the work and the personalities (especially the personalities — he refers several times to the “soap opera” of the literary world) which leave the reader wanting to read more of their books (especially Wolf’s).

OpOs Reise (Esther Kinski, Germany) is a children’s book — not my usual fare, but I wanted to read something by Kinski, and the premise of a school of pilot whales living their lives off the coasts of Scotland and Essex was intriguing. There’s a satisfying blend of humour and pathos which made it an hour well spent.

Anna In is by Kinski’s former translatee Olga Tokarczuk (Poland), and has been translated by both Kinski and (for this edition) Lisa Palmes. It’s very odd indeed: Tokarczuk retells the Sumerian myth of Inanna in a cyberpunk setting (with hints of Discworld), with multiple narrators offsetting the monumentality which you might expect from a tale of gods and the underworld.

My fourth German book was part three of the Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante (Italy) — Die Geschichte der getrennten Wege. It’s a bit shorter and more focused than the sprawling second volume, which was welcome, but as the title implies, we see less of the most obviously interesting character of Lila in this one. Lenu, meanwhile, seems to become more and more amorphous: it’s fascinating to try to judge the reliability of her narration. As with the Gravedigger’s Banquet, I found the main plot twists psychologically obscure, but is this due to Lenu’s or Elena’s storytelling?

Portuguese book of the month was Anos de chumbo e outros contos (Chico Buarque, Brazil). Not easy — the YA-type books I’d read before had somewhat overinflated my confidence, while Buarque has a substantial vocabulary (seeming to include a remarkable number of words for grunting and pushing). I was able to decipher it though, and enjoyed the typical Buarquian touches — stealthy passages of time, bizarre twists, and social engagement.

Finally, graphic novel of the month was The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones (Neil Gaiman, UK — mostly). While it had seemed in the recent volumes that the story had broken down to focus less on on Morpheus and more on side-characters, it turns out that he had a plan all along, and in this bumper issue, (almost) all was tied up. Extra points for high raven content.

Next month is science fiction month. A short one, sadly, but I’ve got some crackers I’d like to get through….

Just eight books finished this month (but some whoppers): four by women/POC, (just) three in German, one in Portuguese, and just three that were part of my original plan. For the six months, 50 total, 35 by women/POC, 26 in German.

• Poor Things — Alasdair Gray
• Katz und Maus — Günter Grass
• Luft und Liebe — Anne Weber
• Memórias de Uma Envelhescente — Judith Nogueira
• Der Hausmann — Wlada Kolosowa
• The Mirror and the Light — Hilary Mantel
• Finding Time Again — Marcel Proust, tr. Ian Patterson
• Ulysses — James Joyce

The plan was to read recently-departed writers: interpreting “recently” quite flexibly for Alasdair Gray and Günter Grass. Hilary Mantel was the only other one I managed to complete, and the almost 40 hours that one took left Martin Amis and A. S. Byatt to be completed (and Milan Kundera to be started) another month.

Poor Things was also a re-read, and that’s yet another thing I want to start doing more (ideally one each month, along with my four German, one Portuguese, one graphic novel…). There was a lot I’d forgotten, probably a lot I appreciated more this time round, and lots of great Gray writing:

“It is hard not to pity those whose powers separate them from all the rest of us, unless (of course) they are rulers doing the usual sort of damage”.

Katz und Maus is the second part of the Danzig Trilogy, but for some reason I’d left it until last. It was very enjoyable to go back to the world of the other two books (Oskar, Tulla Pokriefke etc. turn up again), making this almost a re-read itself, while the novella format created a very different storytelling experience (much more direct, though the diversions of the other two books have their own virtues).

Something similar happened with The Mirror and the Light: a trilogy read in the proper order this time, it was much easier to follow having already been introduced to the main characters. I enjoyed this volume more than the first two, perhaps for that reason, perhaps because Cromwell’s story reaching its conclusion creates more urgency in the story. That despite the vast length of the book — I never grew tired of his company, especially in Ben Miles’ excellent performance of the audiobook.

Luft und Liebe is another short book, in typical Anne Weber-style blending fairytale elements with life in contemporary France. The conceit of the narrator telling her story through her own characters is brilliantly executed, with the distancing effect (indirectness, this time!) heightening the emotional impact.

Der Hausmann was my graphic novel for the month — sort of. This is another formally extravagant book, combining various texts produced by the characters (a graphic novel, a blog, instant messages) alongside the narrative of the househusband of the title. The events are mostly comic, sometimes tragic, and always engaging.

Memórias de Uma Envelhescente is hard to categorise, but is basically a memoir of an “envelhescente” — a word which I think English lacks; roughly, “ageing person”. It was a bit of a shock to find that the writer felt the need to start the book when she started to become old — at the age of 39. The biography is taken as a basis for philosophical commentaries which never descend into self-help banalities.

Lastly, I finished two big reading projects: again, both re-reads. In Finding Time Again (translated by Jenny Diski’s Ian Patterson!), Marcel finds that he’s also become old, while a character “in her fifties” takes pleasure from watching her contemporaries dropping around her. Proust the writer died at 51, so he may have a point. More highlights in my mastodon thread: https://mastodon.green/@slnieckar/111665384530178899

Finally, Ulysses. Not much to say beyond the obvious — this is really a book which needs multiple re-readings, and doing it with Don Gifford’s notes brought me much closer to being able to say I understand (most of) it.

Next projects: as I mentioned, I have an ever-growing list of things I’d like to do each month, which are not all going to happen every time. One non-prose-fiction per month would also be good. Then I’m planning a few more country months (Spain, DDR); in the first half of 2024 I’d like to read one from each European country. And there are some group reads that I’d like to take part in: possibly Der Zauberberg, definitely Portuguese in Translation reads and Kate Briggs/Roland Barthes in #KateBriggs24….

#GermanLitMonth book six completes my perfectly balanced pattern: representing Swiss woman is Martina Clavadetscher, with Knochenlieder. This is a wonderfully strange book. Most obviously, it’s a novel written (pretty much) in verse. That is, there are line breaks, and while there are no formal limits of rhyme or scansion, there’s a frequent focus on the words themselves:

Die nächsten Kilometer
besteht der Anstieg
aus Tragen und Fragen,
und für Jakob vor allem
aus Fragen Ertragen.

Das Geräusch klettert vom Raumraum bis in den Traumraum.

There are strong affinities with the work of Anne Weber — based on what I’ve already read, Annette, ein Heldinnenepos in terms of the novel-as-poem, and Tal der Herrlichkeiten for the fairytale texture. The book is in three sections, very different in milieu and approach, but each combining a dystopian setting with fairytale and ultimately all tied together (with some work from the reader) in an effective story.