Neger, Neger, Schornsteinfeger! by Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi is my second book for #GermanLitMonth — sort of. I was reading it for Black History Month in October, before things got in the way, but it fits into the rulebreakers week of this year’s GLM: Massaquoi was German, at least during the time he writes about, but wrote this memoir in English after settling in the US.
Massaquoi was the grandson of the Liberian consul in Hamburg, left alone in the city with his German mother when his father departed. Massaquoi was a child whem Hitler came to power in the ’30s, and the bulk of the book consists of his reminiscences of the period. These are often extraordinary: in the pre-Nazi days, he was taken to the zoo and found there an “African village,” whose inhabitants were on display and recognised Massaquoi as a “brother”. Later he was himself caught up in the enthusiasm surrounding him and a desire to belong, persuading his nanny to sew a swastika on his jumper.
The later chapters, relating his experiences in Liberia and the US, are not of such great interest, tending to illustrate how brave, resourceful and spirited he was. The book has other defects as literature: the short chapters give it a choppy feel, and the prose is rich in platitudes and cliches. Despite eventually becoming a journalist, Massaquoi wasn’t really much of a writer. Nevertheless, for the insider’s view of being a Black German in this period, I highly recommend the book.
Posted inBooks, Germany|Comments Off on GermanLitMonth: Neger, Neger, Schornsteinfeger!
I’ve finished my first book for #GermanLitMonth: Echtzeitalter, by Tonio Schachinger. Deutscher Buchpreis-winner this year, it’s a Bildungsroman following a teen gamer at a Viennese school very similar to the one Schachinger went to, where he encounters first a Snape-like teacher dedicated to torturing him, and then a barely-distinguishable pair of precocious girls, Feli and Fina, who take his life by storm. The ending is very nicely-judged.
Schachinger’s style is borderline metafictional — the Snape comparision and the indistinguishableness of the girls are explicit, for example, while the book is packed with references to Schlüsselromane and Austrian writers from Adalbert Stifter to Thomas Bernhard and Stefanie Sargnagel. I was incidentally pleased to find that my brain had retained the insulting Austriacisms I’d learned from Eva Menasse’s Dunkelblum (“schiach, Gschisti-Gschasti, deppert”).
I spent most of the book waiting for a major event to happen, and it doesn’t really; this is more a book about remembering or discovering what life is like as a teenage boy. Which brings us back to the ending.
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A Covid-affected reading month meant I only finished seven books, and particularly disrupted my Black History Month plan (to be continued next month). I still finished four in German, one (1) in Portuguese, and five by women/POC.
Schwarzes Herz — Jasmina Kuhnke
A Bicicleta Que Tinha Bigodes — Ondjaki
Schwarzenberg — Stefan Heym
Zwei Schüsse und ein Lachen — Abdulai Sila tr. Renate Heß
Die Geschwister — Brigitte Reimann
Closure: Contemporary Black British Short Stories — Jacob Ross (ed.)
The Prisoner and The Fugitive — Marcel Proust, tr. Carol Clark and Peter Collier
Starting with what I did manage for BHM, Schwarzes Herz was a very powerful account of a character’s experiences with the twin issues of racism and domestic violence. The passages concerning the narrator’s childhood were particularly effective, as where she feels threatened on first meeting other Black people. Only in the latter stages of the story did the book seem over-dominated by the issues rather than the characters; on the whole this was a very impressive first novel.
A Bicicleta Que Tinha Bigodes is a young adult novel set in the Luanda of the author’s childhood, transformed into an enchanting semi-mythical environment. The first part focuses on the narrator’s friend and her close relationship with the animals in her yard, while the main, latter section contains the story of the dreamed-of bicycle. There is a meaningful ending, as to be expected from the genre, but the real pleasure is the journey. (I’ve classed this as part of my BHM reading because the author is mixed-race, though he doesn’t consider himself Black.)
Zwei Schüsse und ein Lachen is the second book I’ve read by Abdulai Sila (from Guinea-Bissau), and the first play. Again semi-mythical, it tells the story of a conflict between a group of people working to save a country very like Guinea-Bissau, under the guidance of a spiritual leader, and the efforts of some to stop them. I found it rather wordy (there’s a lot of the characters telling each other to get to the point, which I could empathise with), and the translator has an irritating habit of retaining Guinean words and phrases, but then immediately translating them.
Finally for BHM, Closure is an interesting and varied collection by Black and Asian British writers. Quite a few of the pieces were engaging, but read like novel extracts rather than fully-satisfying stories. The big names (Monica Ali and Bernardine Evaristo) finish off the book and produced probably the best stories, so it at least ended with a bang.
Then two East German novels, both grappling remarkably honestly with the tension between idealism and realpolitik. Schwarzenberg is the somewhat fact-based story of a mini-state which arises in the Erzgebirge between the American- and Russian-occupied zones of Germany. The inevitable happens, but before that Heym allows us some hope for human nature.
Die Geschwister is set after the establishment of the two German states, but at a time when crossing the border was still relatively straightforward. The protagonist is a Reimannesque young artist who struggles with seeing each of her brothers in turn decide on Republikflucht, and with her own position in the increasingly ossified East German society. There’s no happy ending, but the ambiguity it leaves the reader with is thought-provoking.
I finished eight books this month, mostly as part of a South American reading month (inspired once again by the Portuguese in Translation book group, which this time did Crooked Plow). Only three in German, mainly because 2666 took up 40 hours of my listening time. I count five of the eight as by women/POC, but the latter group gets tricky to define in e.g. Brazil (I found a timely article on Machado de Assis here: https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/cl7xvyz1eyro ).
Crooked Plow — Itamar Vieira Junior, tr. Johnny Lorenz
Budapest — Chico Buarque, tr. Karin von Schweder-Schreiner
Geschwister des Wassers — Andréa del Fuego, tr. Marianne Gareis
The Complete Stories — Clarice Lispector, tr. Katrina Dodson
2666 — Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer
Daytripper — Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá
Epitaph of a Small Winner — Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, tr. William L. Grossman
Sieben leere Häuser — Samanta Schweblin, tr. Marianne Gareis
Crooked Plow (and the accompanying discussion) was interesting in large part because of the culture in which it is steeped: rural peasants who are (largely — that troublesome classification again) the descendants of black slaves, and who continue to live lives which amount to something very like slavery. The Jaré religion plays a central part in their lives, and in the lives of the protagonists in particular; the connection between spirits, people and land is not just local colour, but central to the characters and their story.
Another Brazilian book, Geschwister des Wassers, is in some ways similar: a realist story of development through the construction of a hydroelectric dam collides with fantastic elements (characters disappearing into coffee filters, the dead transformed into ticks) which are accepted by some characters, but rejected by others. Del Fuego combines this with a laconic, fairy-tale style to make a highly enjoyable read.
Epitaph of a Small Winner also blends whimsy and realism; for an example of the former, enjoy chapter 55:
Narrated by the protagonist after his death, this is a kind of Brazilian Tristam Shandy: ironic, metafictional, but with a strong satirical edge (witness the narrator’s excusal of his brother-in-law’s brutality as being required by his business being the smuggling, rather than the legal trading, of slaves). The original title is Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas), and this happened to be only the first book this month to concern a dead Brás.
The second was Daytripper, this month’s graphic novel. It tells the story of Brás de Oliva Domingos’s life, through a series of episodes at the end of each of which Brás dies. The relationship between the stories — or the Bráses — is left poetically open, while the book builds to a powerful conclusion.
A different side of Brazil is presented in The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector: while there’s irrationality here, it’s a modern, neurotic irrationality much more familiar to the European reader. There are a lot of stories here, and it was striking how the ones which I appreciated most are also the ones which the introduction focused on when I read it later. Not I think a testimony to my literary judgment so much as to the variation in quality. At her best though, Lispector was excellent:
“stroking his black hair as if stroking the soft, hot fur of a kitten”
“the daughter-in-law … plunked herself down … and fell silent… ‘I came to avoid not coming,’ shed’d said to Zilda”
“To my sudden torment, … he started slowly removing his glasses. And he looked at me with naked eyes that had so many lashes. I had never seen his eyes that, with their innumerable eyelashes, looked like two sweet cockroaches.”
“Any cat, any dog is worth more than literature.”
Budapest is even more literally a story of a Brazilian who seeks to become European, seduced by the challenge of learning Hungarian. It has a lot in common with the other Buarque novel I’ve read (Mein deutscher Bruder) — an unsympathetic narrator/protagonist, the speeded-up passage of time, and obsessions with language and thinly-characterised women.
Speaking of thinly-characterised women, 2666. There was a lot to like in it, especially the first part, which was very M. John Harrisonian in its non sequiturs:
I’m not quite convinced though that there was 40 hours of my life-worth to like in it. Even bracketing out the Part About the Crimes, which by its nature concerns itself with misogyny, the other female characters (Elizabeth Norton, Rosa Amalfitano, Baroness von Zumpe) all feature mainly as sex objects. There is of course a lot to be said about the difference between the author’s attitudes and those of the society which he depicts….
Finally, one re-read: Sieben leere Häuser. I liked this much more on a second reading (and I liked it quite a lot the first time). The relationships and commonalities between the stories struck me much more (the kinds of emptiness, the relationships between parents and children). I’ve been occasionally comparing with Megan McDowell’s English translation, and found myself critiquing McDowell’s version against the “German original” — time to re-learn Spanish!
Next month is Black History Month (UK edition), although how much time Proust will leave me remains to be seen (The Prisoner/The Fugitive seems a substantial instalment).
Posted inBooks|Comments Off on Reading List September 2023
I finished a modest seven books this month, mainly because it was a Proust month (and Oxen of the Sun in Ulysses took a while). All except Marcel were women for Women in Translation month (two actually in translation, and four in the original German).
The Stories of Eva Luna — Isabel Allende tr. Margaret Sayers Peden
Liebe ist gewaltig — Claudia Schumacher
All the Lovers in the Night — Mieko Kawakami tr. Sam Bett and David Boyd
Sibir — Sabrina Janesch
Sodom and Gomorrah — Marcel Proust, tr. John Sturrock
Madgermanes — Birgit Weyhe
May Ayim: Radikale Dichterin, sanfte Rebellin — Ika Hügel-Marshall et al.
Starting with the odd one out, Sodom and Gomorrah is where we find out, amusingly, that everyone except Marcel is gay. Marcel, meanwhile, sleeps his way through fourteen of Balbec’s little band of girls, as you do. Other highlights on my mastodon thread: https://mastodon.green/@slnieckar/110980369394661379
The Stories of Eva Luna were my short stories for the month (plus Lispector, which I’ll hopefully finish in September for my South American month). Interestingly the stock characters which in e.g. Garcia Marquez look like dodgy sexual politics — the macho general, the happy whore, the silent well-brought-up girl — are the same ones she uses. Lispector’s stories, in comparison, are full of neurotically complex characters; I know that she’s considered a very “European” writer, but the question of how much is due to the writer’s approach, and how much to the subjects (the period?) will require more reading.
Liebe ist gewaltig is a brilliantly written story of the narrator coming to terms with childhood in a violent family, where the father’s rages warp his wife’s and children’s characters. Schumacher adjusts the narrative voice to show the movement (not always progress) from smartarse teen to alienated adult (with a terrifying shift from first to third person as the protagonist becomes a Stepford wife).
All the Lovers in the Night reminded me a lot of Breasts and Eggs, both heavily featuring alcoholic women in publishing having inarticulate conversations. This time, the protagonist is an enigmatic (autism spectrum?) proofreader, who tries to find a way through life through her interactions with the other characters. Despite her difficulties connecting with them, the tender portrayal has a powerful effect on the reader.
Despite the name, Sibir actually takes place in Kazakhstan (and in Germany after the characters’ migrations westward). The ex-Soviet Germans are a substantial, but as far as I can tell little talked-about group in this country, so it was a fascinating read. The plot is occasionally creaky, but the focus on children’s worlds in each narrative thread was very effective.
Graphic novel for the month was Madgermanes (explained in the novel as deriving from “made in Germany”). It tells the story of three Mozambicans who worked in the DDR, with each in turn presenting their own perspective and deepening the reader’s understanding. Both in Germany and (for those who return) in Mozambique, they face exploitation and hostility, though the positives are also portrayed. The visual style creatively combines traditional comic and African motifs.
Lastly, May Ayim: Radikale Dichterin, sanfte Rebellin shows another side of Black life in Germany. There is a mixture of recollections of Ayim by her friends and family, unpublished (very dark, late) poems, and some powerful, mostly academic writing of Ayim’s, which together show the prejudice she and other Afro-Deutsch people faced, and her marvellously good-natured ability to deal with it and process it in her work and activism.
As I mentioned, next month is South American month. I might not get through very many, because one of my selected books is the voluminous 2666, but there are a few I’m eyeing up….
Posted inBooks|Comments Off on Reading List August 2023
Eleven books finished this month, six in German and eight by women/POC — all of those as part of my theme for the month of African writers. I really enjoyed this one, especially because I managed to get books from a good range of countries.
The Ultimate Tragedy — Abdulai Silá tr. Jethro Soutar
Der weiße Fleck — Mohamed Amjahid
So Distant From My Life — Monique Ilboudo tr. Yarri Kamara
Black Foam — Haji Jabir, tr. Sawad Hussain and Marcia Lynx Qualey
Solange wir leben — David Safier
Metro: Kairo Underground — Magdy El-Shafee, tr. Iskander Ahmad Abdalla and Stefan Winkler
Blutbuch — Kim de l’Horizon
African Women’s Writing — ed. Charlotte H. Bruner, various translators
Die sanfte Gleichgültigkeit der Welt — Peter Stamm
Scarlet Odyssey — C. T. Rwizi
Die Schiffbrüchige — Ali Zamir tr. Thomas Brovot
The original prompt for the theme was The Ultimate Tragedy (Guinea-Bissau), which was discussed this month by the Portuguese in Translation group (highly recommended). The book’s plot is a fairly standard tale of colonial oppression, but made interesting by being presented from several different points of view. Silá includes several local (Kreol?) words, retained by the translator, which solidifies the sense of place without causing comprehension problems.
Der weiße Fleck (Morocco/Germany) was a great listen, disturbing and humorous, but most of all illuminating regarding the experience of non-whites living in Germany. The German self-satisfaction at having moved beyond racism is of course largely unjustified, while Amjahid manages to give a positive conclusion with a list of ways for white allies — “sweet potatoes” — to make a contribution.
The next two books, So Distant From My Life (Burkina Faso) and Black Foam (Eritrea), deal with a similar main theme: the reasons for migrants to leave their homes and attempt the journey to Europe. The first of these I found less satisfying — the central character remains opaque throughout, and the treatment of homosexuality is disturbing (and not in a good way, even conceding that gay characters donn’t always have to be the heroes). Black Foam manages to present a much more interesting protagonist; even though his extreme unreliability leaves one similarly uncertain about his true character, this becomes one of the focuses of the novel, with plenty of material for thought.
Die Schiffbrüchige (Comoros) is also in part a story of migration, this time of a woman from the Comoros to Mayotte. This intra-African migration is neglected by western media, but many of the same features are present (as is apparent from the title). I expected this to be “the best novel I’ve read from the Comoros”, but it’s much more than that: Zamir has a very modern style (the endless sentence), buut there’s tremendous substance too in his portrayal of the central character.
Metro: Kairo Underground (Egypt), my graphic novel for the month, was fun, with energetic artwork and fun sound effects in Arabic script, but ultimately unsatisfying. There’s no real conclusion to the plot, which need not be a problem in itself, but I think it is when the story is as plot-driven as this one.
African Women’s Writing was, as one always says about anthologies, a mixed bag, but on the whole I enjoyed the range of voices, and I have plenty of new leads to chase up. The Story of Jesus, by Violet Dias Lannoy, in particular, was an absolute cracker (a schoolboy writing his understanding of the Gospel narrative in a Kenyan context).
Finally, Scarlet Odyssey (Zimbabwe/Eswatini/South Africa) was something quite different: fantasy/science fiction (and the two are interestingly blended), borderline YA, but complex enough to be enjoyable for adults. Continuing the theme of the month, diversity is paramount: Rwizi creates a world of varied societies, all based in turn on a variety of African cultures. There’s a lot of world-building in this first book of a series, and unsurprisingly there isn’t a real conclusion to the story in this volume, but I will be reading on.
Three (mostly) German-language books to finish: Solange wir leben is intriguing in that it’s a novel telling the story of the author’s parents (the writer himself is a character towards the end, but to Safier’s credit I don’t think that you’d guess this “David” was him if you didn’t already know). There’s a lot to enjoy here, and Safier admirably declines to sugar-coat his portrayal of his father, in particular, but the writing style (especially the addiction to sentence fragments) was not quite my thing.
The last two books for this month form a coincidental Swiss mini-theme, and both are very much my thing. Blutbuch is an exploration of the author’s family history, and its influence on their own life. The writing style varies between the straight-forward and stream-of-conscious poetry, all brilliantly performed in the audiobook by the author. Die sanfte Gleichgültigkeit der Welt is also concerned with the protagonist’s family history, this time as an updating of the classically German Doppelgänger theme. In a very short novel, Stamm manages to explore the ramifications of his conceit so brilliantly that I immediately re-listened to the audiobook, and enjoyed it as much (and understood it much more) the second time. As with Stamm’s other books, Christian Brückner narrates perfectly.
Topic for next month is, of course, Women in Translation. Following the slightly odd rules, that will mean women/non-binary people who don’t write in English; possibly not very many, because there’s also the next volume of Proust to get through….
Posted inBooks|Comments Off on Reading List July 2023
I finished a modest seven books this month, mainly because of the continuing Proustathon. Three each in German and by women/POC, which isn’t enough, but for the half year that makes 24 and 31 respectively out of 53, so on target. No particular theme this month other than a bit of everything!
A Flat Place — Noreen Masud
Aliss at the Fire — Jon Fosse tr. Damion Searls
Wenn der Hahn kräht: Zwölf hellwache Geschichten aus Brasilien — ed. Wanda Jakob and Luísa Costa Hölzl, tr. various
Draussen um diese Zeit — Ulrike Ulrich
Der Augenblick der Liebe — Martin Walser
The Sandman Vol. 7: Brief Lives — Neil Gaiman
The Guermantes Way — Marcel Proust, tr. Mark Treharne
A Flat Place was a great start to the month for me: poised somewhere between nature writing and memoir, it explores the relationship between the flatness of the not so obviously attractive landscapes which Masud explores, and the distinctly traumatic experiences of her childhood. Even if I wasn’t convinced by all the links she draws (which might also be a result of listening to the audiobook and not pausing enough at the more abstract parts), I found the honesty of her writing gripping, and her sometimes uncomfortable engagement with the landscapes refreshingly genuine. Bonus points for featuring a black cat called Morvern, which has long been high on my shortlist of potential cat names.
Aliss at the Fire is also heavy on psychological trauma and landscape, somehow packing a multi-generational epic into a novella-length story, despite the typically Fossesqe use of repetition.
I read two short-story collections: Wenn der Hahn kräht gathers stories by various Brazilian women, with an understandable emphasis on the position of women in Brazilian society (not always great). The stories themselves were often rather light, but the title story by Claudia Lage is a banger.
Ulrike Ulrich’s stories are often light on plot, but present intriguing situations; I particularly enjoyed Le Refuge, which follows the mini-society in and around a Paris cafe.
Der Augenblick der Liebe is a very strange book: an elderly man and a young academic have an inexplicable affair, which they intertwine with discussion of an obscure French philosopher. Walser does at least address the improbability and the problematic Altersgeilheit, but with no very convincing result. I listened to this one as an audiobook read by the author, which was energetic, if fatiguing in its one-noteness.
Sandman volume 7 was much more successful: every time I’m impressed by how much Gaiman can pack into a limited space, while allowing room for the reader to develop their own thoughts in response.
Finally, I finished volume 3 of Proust just in time to keep on schedule to finish in 2023: favourite quotes are in a separate thread; most notably for me, the aristocrats (especially the Duchesse) were more interesting than in my memory, but there was still a lot of cringing at their laboured conversations.
Next month I plan a mainly African month: I’ve already got far more books than I’ll be able to finish on my shortlist, so I’ll be focusing on the less obvious countries as much as possible.
Posted inBooks|Comments Off on Reading List June 2023
I finished nine books in May, mostly as part of a POC-reading month: so seven books by POC, one other woman, and a token white male. Only three in German, but two of those were pretty chunky.
Ninth Building — Zou Jingzhi tr. Jeremy Tiang Hadithi & The State of Black Speculative Fiction — Eugen Bacon and Milton Davis Indigo — Clemens J. Setz Your Wish is My Command — Deena Mohamed Black Spartacus — Sudhir Hazareesingh Two Thousand Million Man-power — Gertrude Trevelyan Wo auch immer ihr seid — Khuê Pham Old Land, New Tales — Chen Zhongshi and Jia Pingwa (ed.), multiple translators Brüder — Jackie Thomae
Ninth Building was unfinished as part of my International Booker month in April, and fitted in well here too. It’s an excellent book: Zou presents vignettes of the Cultural Revolution years in two sections, drawing on his childhood and young adult years respectively. In both, the juxtaposition of revolutionary madness and everyday life both highlights the contrast, and makes the bleak circumstances a nevertheless enjoyable read. The final section, consisting of a short selection of poem, didn’t grab me in the same way, but that may be just me.
The other Chinese book this month, Old Land, New Tales, is a collection of stories from Shaanxi province. The slightly odd nature of the project presumably has some bureaucratic origin, as reflected in the unintentionally comic potted biographies of each author, which focus on their association memberships and positions; they address the works mainly via lists of titles (mostly dull, but some intriguing: “Mr. Sister, … Champion Sheep, … Martyr Granny”) and po-faced comments (“he has held up the ideal of equality and created numerous characters with high morals and a great sense of ethics”). A lot of the stories are in a similar vein (honest, sturdy peasants, steadfast party officials), and Xi’an, the capital and a great world city, is bafflingly absent. All of which sounds awful, but there are some gems towards the end of the book where the authors attempt much more interesting things.
The other collection of stories this month was Hadithi & The State of Black Speculative Fiction, another of Luna Press’s story/lit-crit hybrids. The stories are by two writers, of which I found Bacon’s focus on human experience the more engaging.
Turning to a thoroughly brilliant book, Your Wish is My Command is an Egyptian graphic novel, set in an alternative world where wishes really do come true. As in the classic stories, the wish allows Mohamed to explore the difference between what we want and what is good for us, with a great blend of thoughtfulness and humour. The art is also fantastic, especially the calligraphic genies:
Black Spartacus is a biography of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture; it presents a fascinating figure who combined great military and political abilities, religious and revolutionary ideals, and a sizeable ego. The author is very, perhaps overly sympathetic to his subject (his megalomaniac later years are not ignored, but arguably sugar-coated), but Louverture was clearly an extremely impressive man.
Two of the German books base their stories on the lives of those who came to Germany to study. In Wo auch immer ihr seid, the narrator’s parents came to the West and never left, becoming estranged from their family in Vietnam and later America through a series of misunderstandings. The movement of the plot is clunky at times, but the author is excellent at showing the touching and humorous side of diaspora Vietnamese life.
The second book, Jackie Thomae’s Brüder, has an unusual two-part structure, each telling the story of a son fathered by a Senegalese student in the East. The contrasting lives of the two are shown with great style and empathy, making the book a very satisfying whole.
Indigo is another great book by Clemens J. Setz, in his unique style. Ole Lagerpusch narrates the dialogue particularly well, drawing out the (realistic) absurdist humour. The novel (from 2012) has particular resonance now: a mysterious disease among children produces ill-effects when anyone approaches them, forcing the adoption of a social-distancing regimen. Two strands focus on one Indigo child, Robert, and his teacher: Clemens J. Setz.
Finally, I read Two Thousand Million Man-power for a book club discussion, and am pleased to have found another writer (very) roughly comparable to Dorothy Richardson. There’s a lot of overlap between the world of Pilgrimage and Trevelyan’s characters, from the seedy lodging houses to the political meetings and the ABC cafes. The gimmick in this novel is the presentation of the central relationship against the background of events across the globe: sometimes reminiscent of The Dead (“out in the country it was dark and quiet to the west”), sometimes personal, sometimes political (“Poland was making a defensive alliance with Rumania”). The effect, combined with the vicissitudes the characters go through, is very powerful, though not always an easy read, and the onward rush of modernity is again a very topical theme.
Next month, my anti-plan is to have as varied a selection of genres as possible….
Posted inBooks|Comments Off on Reading List May 2023
I finished nine books this month, with the usual four in German; only four by women/POC, but I’m planning a people of colour month for May to balance things a bit. All but two were in translation, mainly because of my International Booker theme for the month.
Graue Bienen — Andrej Kurkow tr. Sabine Grebing and Johanna Marx In einer dunkelblauen Stunde — Peter Stamm The Discomfort of Evening — Marieke Lucas Rijneveld tr. Michele Hutchison Nova Hellas: Stories from Future Greece — ed. Francesca T Barbini and Francesco Verso tr. Dimitra Nikolaidou et al. Ein simpler Eingriff — Yael Inokai In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower — Marcel Proust tr. James Grieve The World Goes On — László Krasznahorkai tr. John Batki et al. Breasts and Eggs — Mieko Kawakami tr. Sam Bett and David Boyd Leonard und Paul — Rónán Hession tr. Andrea O’Brien
Starting with the first of those, Graue Bienen is by Andrej Kurkow (from Ukraine, longlisted this year); it’s set against the background of the Russian invasion and occupation not of 2022, but of 2014 — an important reminder of recent history. Against this background the main character and his story are very gentle, as he first copes with life in the “grey zone” between the opposing armies, then takes his bees on a tour of southern Ukraine in search of safety. The book does go on perhaps a bit longer than necessary, but overall it was very enjoyable.
Peter Stamm (Switzerland) was shortlisted in 2013, and since I discovered him recently he’s become one of my favourite German-language authors. In einer dunkelblauen Stunde explores some of his typical themes — unreliable memories of the past, the lives of artists — this time through the interaction between an ageing author and his prospective biographical film-maker. In a very meta twist, there is apparently a film following Stamm through the process of writing the book, though I haven’t tracked it down yet.
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (Netherlands) won the prize in 2020 for The Discomfort of Evening. In Jeanette Wintersonian style, it tells the story of a girl growing up in a fairly extreme religious community, this time on a farm in the southern Netherlands. The family transfer their various repressed desires to a range of sexual and violent forms of behaviour towards each other and the animals on the farm, and I found the book as pleasant as that sounds. There are some great bits of writing: the narrator has fluorescent stars above her bed, but, “Dad has already taken away a few, which he does whenever I come home with a bad grade and it’s his turn to tuck me up at night”; these are outnumbered however by the improbably elaborate similes which she favours (“grown-ups are often confusing because their heads work like a Tetris game and they have to arrange all their worries in the right place”).
The World Goes On is by László Krasznahorkai (Hungary, winner 2015); it’s a short story collection of sorts, although with a very broad definition of “story”. The style (seemingly endless sentences) is certainly hard work, and can be infuriating (when used for rambling metaphysics), or extremely powerful when used to actually express the stories and their ideas. I enjoyed it enough to want to explore further, at least.
Breasts and Eggs (Mieko Kawakami, Japan, shortlisted 2022) has an intriguing history: Kawakami wrote a novella with the same title, then reworked it later and added a second part, retitling the whole “Summer Stories” (also a play on the main character’s name, I think). I found it fascinating — it explores the lot of (particularly working class) women in Japan, with a obsessive emphasis on their bodies (most of which are skinny and constantly sweating). Some oddities in the English are presumably normal in Japanese (“When my beer came, Makiko screamed happy birthday to Midoriko”), which is fine and adds interest; others just seem strange (“Despite giving the impression of a person who avoided sweets, she ordered tiramisu with her coffee and really savoured it”). The second part in particular is rather rambling, but both build up to spectacular climactic scenes which are impressively done.
Turning to other translations, Leonard und Paul is also interestingly titled, being “Leonard and Hungry Paul” in English. Omitting the title’s key word in translation is a bold move, and I’m not sure why it was done that way. (I’m also not sure why it’s in the English title, but that’s clearly the point). The descriptions of daily live in Paul’s family do sometimes verge on the Pooterish, but overall it’s a lovely book celebrating a pair of introverted friends, and looking at how they get on in the world.
Nova Hellas: Stories from Future Greece was less successful: there are problems with the translation (“Nah. I myself arranged to draft the reports now”), and some of the stories have the common SF failing of focusing on the ideas rather than the characters or the story (or the writing). The final story (“The Colour that Defines Me”) is probably the strongest, as it does do things with each of those.
Ein simpler Eingriff is a short but excellent book, focusing on a nurse whose professional and personal lives reach parallel crises. She interacts with various other strong-minded women (sister, patient, lover), and it’s these relationships which make the work so powerful.
And with a bit of delay, I finished the second volume of Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower; highlights on mastodon: https://mastodon.green/@slnieckar/110291997758206313 .
Posted inBooks|Comments Off on Reading List April 2023
I finished eight books this month — seven in German (mostly quite short, hence the vaguely respectable total), and four by women (no POC, which I need to make up for soon). Rough plan for this month was a world tour of German, with books from Austria, France, Argentina, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, and … Prague.
Ein Landarzt: Kleine Erzählungen — Franz Kafka
The Book of Chameleons — José Eduardo Agualusa tr. Daniel Hahn
Peršmanhof — Evelyn Steinthaler
Liebes Arschloch — Virginie Despentes tr. Ina Kronenberger and Tatjana Michaelis
Kalpa Imperial — Angélica Gorodischer tr. Karin Will
Die Geschichte eines neuen Namens — Elena Ferrante tr. Karin Krieger
Vermeer — Pieter Roelofs et al. tr. Susanne Karau et al.
Der Persische Orden und andere Grotesken — Anton Chekhov tr. Alexander Eliasberg
Ein Landarzt was a timely reminder of just how odd Kafka could be, especially in the title story. The longer stories (the title story and Ein Bericht für eine Akademie) were the most rewarding for me; the Chekhov collection, which contains mostly slight, rather fragmentary satires, was in some ways similar, but does include some fantastic illustrations by W. N. Massjutin (in the excellent PG version: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53731 ):
There were more short stories in Kalpa Imperial (billed as a novel, but with no overall structure that I could see other than the storyteller-narrator and a tendency to get very weird towards the end). There was again a variety of length and weight to the stories, but they were always enjoyable: there are lots of influences which could be found, but I at least enjoyed the similarities to M John Harrison’s Viriconium books, Jeff Vandermeer’s Ambergris books, and Walter Moers.
Then a couple of non-fictions: Peršmanhof is a non-fiction graphic novel (?), briefly telling the story of a massacre committed by German troups in southern Austria in the final days of the war. A helpful afterword gives more background on the preceding and following events (depressingly but predictably, no-one faced legal consequences).
As preparation for the exhibition, I’ve been working my way through the Vermeer exhibition catalogue, which is very well done: hefty in size, but heavily illustrated, with close-ups and related works, supporting essays which point out in accessible terms the themes running through different groups of pictures.
Then three novels: Liebes Arschloch was another book which helped my German vocabulary (this time mainly drugs and alcohol-related), as well as being an impressively fair look at characters affected by the #MeToo movement in France. Covid hits the characters without warning half-way through the book, in very effective fashion.
Die Geschichte eines neuen Namens is the second volume of Ferrante’s Neapolitan series; it’s much longer than the first, and I’m not quite convinced it had to be that long, but it was always enjoyable. As in the first volume, the most interesting aspect is the development of the character of Lila, along with her relationship with the narrator, and Ferrante mostly does a good job of making teenagers’ love lives interesting.
Finally, the only English book this time was The Book of Chameleons, which I read for a book group where José Eduardo Agualusa and Daniel Hahn discussed the novel and its translation. They were both entertaining and informative, and I was pleased to discover a really good novelist from Angola. Oddly, Agualusa turns out to now be living on Mozambique Island, just a few kilometres from Lisa St Aubin de Terán, who was a highlight of last month’s reading.
My plan for April is to have an International Booker month: some of the longlisted books from this year, possibly some other works by the longlisted authors, and some previous winners.
Posted inBooks|Comments Off on Reading List March 2023
