Dancing Mad God

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 .

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.

I finished a healthy eleven books in a short month, mainly due to several volumes of short stories; four books in German, and seven of the eleven by women/POC. My main focus this month was reading some of the original “Best of Young British Novelists” from 1983, especially one I hadn’t read previously. No longer young, of course, but it was great to read some new old writers. For German I had a very loose plan of “winners or nominees from the Deutscher Buchpreis”.

• Blood Libels — Clive Sinclair
• Episodes — Christopher Priest
• Banthology — Sarah Cleave et al.
• Das glückliche Geheimnis — Arno Geiger
• Mozambique Mysteries — Lisa St Aubin de Terán
• Die Katze und der General — Nino Haratischwili
• Spiel auf vielen Trommeln: Erzählungen — Olga Tokarczuk tr. Esther Kinsky
• Piranha to Scurfy and Other Stories — Ruth Rendell
• The Complete Maus — Art Spiegelman
• Noonday — Pat Barker
• Kältere Schichten der Luft — Antje Rávik Strubel

Starting with the BYBNs, Christopher Priest was the only one I’d already read. Some of the stories themselves were familiar from another of his collections, but there was an interesting mix of styles from the length of his career. A highlight for me was Palely Loitering, where a meeting between past and future versions of the narrator are used to show their different perceptions, each convinced that he is right:

I could remember how I had seen myself, my older self, that is. I recalled my ‘friend’ from this day as callow and immature, and mannered with a loftiness that did not suit his years. That I (as child) had seen myself (as young man) in this light was condemnation of my then lack of percipience.

Blood Libels was one of the most unpleasant books I’ve ever read — something of a speciality of the time, perhaps, with Ian McEwan and Iain Banks also both in their shocking phases. In this case it seems to be combined with my idea of Philip Roth’s style (another omission of mine until now), so the sexual violence at least had an interesting Jewish flavour.

Noonday turns out to be the last part of a trilogy, but it stands up well enough on its own. It’s fantastically written, adding a direct, modern feeling to the period (Second World War) atmosphere:

Two glasses of whisky later, Rachel was already slightly slewed. She squinted at Elinor, as if a sea-fret had suddenly blown into the drawing room.

They found the family still in the drawing room, slumped in armchairs with the dazed, disorientated look of the recently bereaved and the totally pissed.

Further along, by the yard door, a man’s head rested on the concrete, severed neatly at the neck, one eye closed. Kenny pushed it to one side with his foot and opened the door into the alley.

As Paul turned the corner, he saw a stick of bombs come tumbling down the beam of a searchlight on to a building fifty yards ahead, an extraordinary sight, like a worm’s-eye view of somebody shitting.

I found the plot thread about the obese medium (reminiscent of Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black, I’m not sure how coincidentally) hard to take for the same reasons as in that case (essentially, it seems that she has real supernatural powers), but the book as a whole was very satisfying.

The biggest surprise was Lisa St Aubin de Terán: I’d always been vaguely aware of her existence, but no more; it turns out that she moved to northern Mozambique almost 20 years ago, and since then has been setting up and running a college of tourism and agriculture. Mozambique Mysteries is not particularly mysterious, and in terms of writing style it’s quite straightforward, so perhaps it wasn’t the best place to start, but it was fascinating to compare her experiences with my own at the other end of the country. There are some disconcerting oddities: she talks about her determination to establish schools in Africa from before she had ever visited, and devises her own herbal remedy against malaria, but generally she shows an awareness that her position in the community is accidental: “Being a writer doesn’t bring much credit in an area where there are no books to speak of.”

these same so-called ‘backward’ villages have a form of democracy that works, that truly represents its people, that gives the chance of equality to all members of the community, and pre-empted the notion of a welfare state by several centuries.

Her right-hand man at the college has the best line in the book, sideswiping whitey while praising their drinking ability:

I always thought that colour was just about your skin and a certain hardness of heart, a lack of compassion, but now I am wondering if it isn’t a lot more than that. Six bottles in just over an hour!

Occasional references to her earlier life show the uniqueness and universality of her experience:

My expectation of how life should be was so rarefied that I managed to squeeze a few lives into the 1970s without really noticing them pass by. During that decade, I was benignly stalked by, and cradle-snatched by, a Venezuelan revolutionary and taken to his inherited lands in the Andes, and I became a farmer and a mother, a writer and then a refugee without realizing that that was my life, rather than the other more elusive dreams I was endlessly chasing.

Graphic novel of the month was The Complete Maus, by Art Spiegelman, and it’s brilliant. The representation of the characters by different animals is very effective, creating enough distance without trivialising the events, and the juxtaposition of the Holocaust narrative with the long-term effects on Spiegelman’s father is extremely moving.

Two English story collections: Banthology contains stories by writers from the countries affected by the Muslim travel ban of the early Trump presidency, while Piranha to Scurfy presents tales of the (mostly) uncanny by Ruth Rendell. Both were mixed bags, as so often, but the two novellas in the Rendell collection were impressively atmospheric.

Spiel auf vielen Trommeln also tends towards the weird, if with more absurdist humour. I particularly liked the opening story, about a writer’s struggles with his doppelgänger. Kältere Schichten der Luft is a fascinating precursor of Strubel’s recent Blaue Frau — a mysterious woman appears (by water!) in a Nordic country, and there’s a tale involving sexual violence, queerness, and memory. In this case there’s less definite resolution than in the later work, so it’s less immediately satisfying, but the atmospheric Swedish summer setting is attractive, and there’s plenty to think about.

Das glückliche Geheimnis was the first of my birthday subscription books, and an excellent start! At first I assumed that it was fictional rather than a memoir; once I realised around half-way through, it was interesting how my mental picture of the situation changed — less cartoon-like, and more realistic in my preconceptions of what could and couldn’t happen in the book.

Finally, Die Katze und der General was certainly long (23 hours in the audiobook); I’m not sure it really had to be, but it was enjoyable to follow Haratischwili wherever she decided to take the story. The performances by several different narrators were excellent. I liked it enough that I’m planning to crack on with Das achte Leben when I have about 40 hours spare.

Next month, a world tour of German, plus volume two of Proust….

I finished nine books in January, five by women/POC, and a below-target three in German (I’ve been listening to the very chunky Die Katze und der General, hopefully to be finished in February). This was a French month (six of the nine), to start off my 2023 read of Proust in suitable style.

• Getting Lost — Annie Ernaux tr. Alison L. Strayer
• Numa Roumestan — Alphonse Daudet tr. Charles de Kay
• Simultan — Ingeborg Bachmann
• In the Kitchen with Alain Passard — Christophe Blain tr. Elizabeth Bell
• The Way by Swann’s — Marcel Proust tr. Lydia Davis
• Tal der Herrlichkeiten — Anne Weber
• Dann schlaf auch du — Leïla Slimani tr. Amelie Thoma
• A Game of Snakes and Ladders — Doris Langley Moore
• Light Rains Sometimes Fall — Lev Parikian

Getting Lost is probably not the best place to start with Ernaux — much of the interest for me was that I’m already invested in her as a character in her other works, so it was fascinating to see the “real” her in her diary. Ernaux herself seems to be determined to make the relationship as dramatic as possible (“I write my love stories, and live my books”), almost as a piece of performance art.

Numa Roumestan was quite interesting, though it didn’t fill me with an urgent desire for more Daudet. The differences between northern and southern France are given a broad-brush/prejudiced treatment (“showing that loosened look of the face and revealing in the corners of the eyes and the mouth a character at once weak and violent—all the passions and nothing to resist them. Faces down south are like the Southern landscape.”), but the scheming peasant sister was at least entertaining.

Graphic novel of the month was In the Kitchen with Alain Passard — a graphic novel in some very loose sense, it’s essentially an extended interview with Passard and his staff, in comic form, interspersed with the chef’s recipes. Very odd, but enjoyable, especially the detours to the different farms where he grows vegetables for his restaurant. Most of the recipes (and Passard’s cooking in general) focus on vegetables rather than meat, so some could actually be attempted.

I liked Dann schlaf auch du much more than I’d expected; the story starts at the end, so the interest is not in where we’re going, but how we get there. Along the way, the economic and racial injustices in contemporary France are neatly skewered, sometimes subtly (as in the French-Moroccan mother’s non-reaction to her friends’ racism), other times more broadly.

I’m planning to reread Proust over the course of the year, and loved Lydia Davis’s translation of The Way by Swann’s. Details and particularly good/weird bits in my two Mastodon threads: https://mastodon.green/@slnieckar/109693054146687675 and https://mastodon.green/@slnieckar/109757037221321445 .

One last mostly-French book: Tal der Herrlichkeiten is by the German-French writer Anne Weber, who produces her books in both languages. A mythic story set in contemporary France, the two elements complement each other brilliantly — the sometimes shocking and fantastic elements lend weight, and the realism of the modern setting brings verisimilitude.

Simultan is another one which I hadn’t expected to like so much (I have memories of Malina being a slog). It reminded me of Eva Menasse’s Tiere Für Fortgeschrittene, with mostly longish stories focusing on relationships.

I read A Game of Snakes and Ladders for a reading group which now isn’t happening this month at least, but I’m glad I was spurred to read one I normally wouldn’t. The setting of interwar Egypt is intriguing; the racial attitudes of the characters are obviously suspect (dirty Arabs, covetous Jews etc.), and I’m less than confident about the author’s own position, but that’s something which that discussion might address if the time comes.

Finally, I’ve spent the last year reading Light Rains Sometimes Fall one micro-season at a time. We’ve been exploring our local patch at the same time as reading about his, and it’s been great to compare the two as the year has progressed (“The act of noticing, once undertaken, makes you realise how little of your life you’ve spent looking – really looking”). I’m very jealous of his peregrines and dunnocks. There are good jokes:

You’ll see crows with chips in their beaks; you might also see them dropping molluscs or nuts from a great height to smash them open. You wouldn’t bet against them perpetrating a basic phishing scam against the elderly.

Fun writing:

She is there, on the nest. A minute’s looking and I find the father, up and to the left, alertness birdified.

Even the sight of one swift squiggling around high above the house like an excitable parenthesis has me craning my neck to watch.

Ways to see:

The mind wanders, thinks odd, disturbing, circular thoughts. To keep it on the straight and narrow I set it little tasks, observational homework. Go for a walk and look for square things. Or smooth things. Or green things.

And much to empathise with:

I’m familiar with scattery movements. They’re the bane of my life. Because once you’ve seen one you’re obliged by the laws of nature-watching to see where it takes you, and where it takes you is often peering into a mass of foliage, waiting for it to repeat itself.

Nine books finished this month, five by women/POC and five in German, for a total of 66 for the half-year (124 for the year).

• Kleine Chronik Vier Erzählungen — Stefan Zweig
• Auf See — Theresia Enzensberger
• The Miracle Shed — Philip MacCann
• Landgericht — Ursula Krechel
• March Moonlight — Dorothy M. Richardson
• FLEXEN: Flâneusen schreiben Städte — Özlem Özgül Dündar et al.
• Tiere für Fortgeschrittene — Eva Menasse
• Hummingbird Salamander — Jeff Vandermeer
• Watchmen — Alan Moore

Starting with the short stories, I bought The Miracle Shed some time in the 90s, was blown away by the style when I started reading it, but then found it heavy-going and never finished it. A quarter of a century later, I’m very glad to have read the whole thing: the style perhaps dominates the content, and it’s not always clear what meaning (if any) lies behind it, but the puzzles don’t make it any less interesting or enjoyable.

Tiere für Fortgeschrittene also has some puzzles — each story is prefaced by a short account of a particular animal’s special feature, which in some way relates to the story itself. The relationship is often obscure, to me at least, but it gives the reader something to think about even after the book is closed. I found the length of the stories somewhat unwieldy — they’re generally about the 30 page mark, which requires a certain time commitment, but I appreciated the depth Menasse was able to go into in each one.

Stefan Zweig’s Kleine Chronik Vier Erzählungen was also very enjoyable, combining dark romanticism with the encroaching modernity of the early 20th century. The first and last stories, Die unsichtbare Sammlung and Buchmendel, are each about artistic devotion of different kinds, and were particularly striking for me.

My only non-fiction book this month was Flexen, a collection of texts by a diverse group of writers (mostly women, often POC) on their relationship with the city: we see how their experiences differ from those of the classic middle-class, white male flâneur, and how they deal with it. In India, for example, an activist flâneuse pointedly spends time outdoors:

Bei ihrer ersten Aktion vor vier Jahren legte sich Neha Singh gemeinsam mit einer Freundin mittags in einen Park im bürgerlichen Teil des Vorortes Kandivali, um dort auf der Grasmatte ein Nickerchen zu halten.

While in the Islamic world:

Kann eine verschleierte Frau mit Kind an der Hand eine Flâneuse sein?
Kann ein Mädchen an der Hand seiner Mutter eine Flâneuse sein?

The two German novels this month were both audiobooks: Landgericht reminded me of Anne Weber’s Ein Heldinnenepos in its focus on the post-war life of those who have had extraordinary wartime experiences. In both there is an element of the seemingly unstructured which gives an added sense of realism.

Auf See was in some respects right up my street — near future dystopian sci-fi, set near my part of Germany — and the societies depicted (a dilapidated seastead in the Baltic, reminiscent of the base in Solaris, and a Berlin trying to recover from various calamities) were intriguing. I had several problems with it: we’re frequently told how charismatic one of the main characters is, without any particular evidence; the plot hinges on some rather forced coincidences and parallelisms; and the author was not the ideal choice to read the audiobook. I’m interested enough to read more by her, at least.

Hummingbird Salamander was another audiobook that I had some problems getting into, partly due to the narrator, but partly also my fault (leaving too long between listenings to keep the story in mind). After the halfway point I was much more caught up in it, and I enjoyed spending time with the non-standard protagonist.

Graphic novel for the month was Watchmen, and it’s fantastic. As with Sandman, it’s good to catch up (OK, I’m still 30 years behind) with a whole area of culture I’d previously neglected. Fortunately there’s more Sandman and more Moore to work my way through.

Final instalment of Pilgrimage! March Moonlight is fragmentary, and doesn’t provide nearly as satisfactory an ending as Dimple Hill did. But there are some lovely bits of writing that I wouldn’t be without:

Great bits:

during the dark months, all the doings of the light, half of whose pageant, in the height of summer, must daily be missed, fall well within the waking hours

Hurrying almost the length of the long platform in search of corner seats, finding in every carriage just four men screened by opened newspapers, we meekly took windowless middle places and sat, unnoticed, in hilarious silence

darkness might bring a kind of unity. As does even a deep twilight as it enters, late on a summer’s evening, a roomful of contestants. Host and guest in one, it can be felt at work reconciling differences, transforming each sitter into an almost invisible fellow-traveller within the mystery of space and producing, as it deepens, first a lowering of voices and presently a silence so nearly complete as to impel the arrival of the blindingly brilliant indoor light.

the incident of that winter’s morning when the husband, to prevent her going, with a heavy cold, to early Mass, locked the wardrobe containing all her hats, only to see her, a little later, sailing down the road with her small head supporting his large bowler, draped elegantly with a white veil.

Miriam being Miriam:

Only in silence, in complete self-possession, possession of the inwardness of being, can lovers fully meet. An enthusiastic vocal engagement is a farewell. Marriage usually a separation, life-long?

Glimpses of M’s relationship with her sisters:

Sally knew, had known all her life, Mim’s tiresome insistence on thought and now, at this date, if one were to produce what one had in mind, she would think to herself: ‘That’s the sort of thing that keeps you without a home.’

M realises that Harriett is also a person, but in the next paragraph totally fails to understand her life choices:

And for the first time I realized that my porch was Harriett’s also.

There she was, gazing, in solitude, into her own life, realizing it as it slipped, with the approach of marriage, away into the past, realizing that soon it would be inaccessible.

End of year greatest hits:

• Pilgrimage (13 for one offer)
• Second-hand Time — Svetlana Alexievich tr. Bela Shayevich
• Dunkelblum — Eva Menasse
• The Books of Jacob — Olga Tokarczuk tr. Jennifer Croft
• Die Fremde — Claudia Durastanti tr. Annette Kopetzki
• A Manual for Cleaning Women — Lucia Berlin
• What I Don’t Know About Animals — Jenny Diski
• Der Trost Runder Dinge — Clemens J. Setz
• Der andere Name (Heptalogie I – II) — Jon Fosse tr. Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel
• Wenn es dunkel wird — Peter Stamm
• blues in schwarz weiss | nachtgesang — May Ayim
• Zur See — Dörte Hansen

Plans for the next six months:

• French month, starting a reading of Proust;
• South American month (or possible one Portuguese, one Spanish);
• Japanese month;
• non-fiction month;
• continue with a graphic novel a month;
• at least half women/POC each month;
• at least four a month in German on average;
• read the plays and poetry I neglected this time.

Ten books finished this month, five by women/POC, and eight in German thanks to #GermanLitMonth!

• Momo — Michael Ende
• Das Archiv der Gefühle — Peter Stamm
• Die Haarteppichknüpfer — Andreas Eschbach
• Der Trip — Nozomi Horibe tr. Gregor Suchan
• Dimple Hill — Dorothy M. Richardson
• Die Liebe zur Zeit des Mahlstädter Kindes — Clemens J. Setz
• Nebenan — Kristine Bilkau
• Prosastücke — Robert Walser
• Zur See — Dörte Hansen
• The Appointment — Katharina Volckmer

I’ve organised the German books into the four suggested GermanLitMonth categories:

First time for everything

My first book of the month (but my second by the author) was Michael Ende’s Momo. The earlier sections are reminiscent of The Little Prince, with parable-like episodes (and both books straddle the children’s book/literature divide). Later it becomes a more conventional, but enjoyable, adventure story.

Nebenan was the first book I’ve read by Kristine Bilkau. It’s short and atmospheric, with a very symbolic canal running through the village where most of the action takes place (the semi-industrial setting reminded me of Deniz Ohde’s Streulicht). Bilkau assembles themes and draws (sometimes forced) connections between neighbours in a story where a lot is left unresolved. I had to adjust my expectations, but there are lots of clever details (a woman dyeing her hair before an IVF appointment, the children’s games played by exchanging notes).

The Appointment is written in English, so a slight cheat. Energetically shocking, for most of the book it’s great fun, but I thought trying a bit too hard. The final sections add an impressive emotional weight to the extravagance.

Second helpings

It took me a while to get into Das Archiv der Gefühle, my second book by Peter Stamm, as it lacks the humour of the first (Wenn es dunkel wird), but it’s a great exploration of truth and fantasy through a very unreliable narrator’s monologue. Covid lurks in the background, but the protagonist (an archivist who is mysteriously vague about his own life) constructs his own, largely independent reality.

Another second book for an author (and firm favourite) was Die Liebe zur Zeit des Mahlstädter Kindes. I read Setz’s later collection of stories — Der Trost runder Dinge — first, and enjoyed it more (more subtle, and not so dependent on shock for its effectiveness), but the earlier volume iss still full of wonderful images (the apartments on a big wheel, the author in an archive…).

More short stories (or at least short texts) in my second book by Robert Walser, but I may leave at that for now. He carries the archness which I think is often present in Austrian writing to an extreme which I find hard to take; here’s a typical sentence from several pages about eating a sausage:

Ich ass, was ich nimmermehr so schnell hätte essen, was ich mir lieber nimmermehr so eilig hätte schmecken lassen sollen.

I’m glad I kept reading for the last two parable-like stories, though: Schwendimann and Ich habe nichts, and there are some other good phrases along the way:

Göttlich schön und gross ist es, junge Wangen und junge Lebensanschauungen zu haben.

Firm favourites

Andreas Eschbach’s Die Haarteppichknüpfer is an odd mixture of pseudo-Mediaeval and sci-fi world-building, reminiscent of Iain M. Banks. The earlier sections have an intriguing blend of realism, horror and comedy; later the book opens out into a wider, but less satisfying narrative explaining the mysterious carpets.

Dörte Hansen is one of my favourite authors in any language, and Zur See is exactly what she does so well: eccentric, but relatable characters dealing with a changing social and literal landscape. This time the sea and the North Sea island give a particularly vivid sense of place. If I have any reservations, it’s that all her books do tend to follow a similar formula, but they’re so good that lardly seems to matter.

Something different

My graphic novel for the month was Nozomi Horibe’s comic of her cycle tour of Brandenburg. It’s touching and amusing (often at her own expense), and beautifully drawn in almost monochrome. Some of the panels are inventively playful (to this non-expert). Disappointingly, she passed through my area, but didn’t seem to find anything worth of mention! (There’s a very unobtrusive translation credit for Gregor Suchan, and I think it was translated from English into German).

Pilgrimage

And the monthly instalment of Pilgrimage (by a Germanophile, at least!) — Dimple Hill was great fun. Miriam wanders around in what appears to be Adam Bede transferred to the West Country, develops a crush on a not very interesting farmer, and then sets off on her independent way again. Meanwhile there are plenty of gold nuggets:

staying deedily on with the Pernes

immediately below her, at the wash-stand within whose rose-pink cake of fresh soap were safely stored the days to come, one escaped.

manlike, he had been unaware of being the sole speaker

Mrs Roscorla gave her a small nod, a gay little nod that seemed to tell her she was an old friend and exempt from formalities, and also clearly expressing pleasure in occasions for nodding

Miss Roscorla, having provided the late comer with tea, was cutting into the bun upon her own plate, absently, as if preoccupied, or simulating the mental preoccupation demanded by conversation, in the way of women who create the appearance of paying tribute to what is being said by deliberately assuming a manner suggesting distraction from whatever at the moment they happen to be doing.

But is making, pictures and bridges, and thumbscrews, humanity’s highest spiritual achievement?

a brisk middle-aged woman brimming with common sense and permanently impatient with the lack of it in almost every one she met.

a small, small-featured, small-minded and very refined elderly woman

Living always remote, drawn away into the depths of the spirit, they see, all the time, freshly. A perpetual Sunday.

‘She’s nothing but a slap-cabbage.’

Ten books finished this month, all by women/POC thanks to Black History Month! Despite the British/Irish timing of BHM, the main focus was on German Black history.

• Contrapunctus — Michael Götting
• Gesammeltes Schweigen — Heinrich Böll and Sharon Dodua Otoo
• How Long ’til Black Future Month? — N. K. Jemisin
• Black Stars — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie et al.
• Aya Vol. 1: Life in Yop City — Marguerite Abouet tr. Helge Dascher
• Schwarze Wurzeln — Katharina Oguntoye
• Clear Horizons — Dorothy M. Richardson
• Glory — NoViolet Bulawayo
• blues in schwarz weiss | nachtgesang — May Ayim
• Devil on the Cross — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Starting with those Germans, Contrapunctus is a short novel about Afro-Deutsch life in post-unification Berlin. It begins in an essentially realistic mode, but over the course of the book the attacks experienced by one character, which draw on colonial and slaving history, come to dominate. Gesammeltes Schweigen is an interesting counterpoint: Otoo’s fragmentary text engages with the Böll story, exploring the meaning of silences in a less dramatic, but equally effective manner.

The other two German works make another pair: the authors collaborated on another work (Farbe bekennen) which is now on my must-read list. Schwarze Wurzeln is an essentially academic text, detailing the experience of Black people in Germany down to the post-war era. The main sources are oral interviews with a Black German family, and official (often openly racist) government documents, providing a fascinating contrast of language and experience. There’s a grim comedy in the Nazi-era officials trying to find employment for Black Germans who have lost their jobs to the racist attitudes of the white population. Ayim’s two volumes of poems focus on more recent Afro-Deutsch experiences, where the racism is often (by no means always) less explicit; her language games make the book a joyful experience, however.

Two collections of short stories this month: Jemisin’s had an irresistible title, and was very enjoyable: some stories relate more or less directly to the worlds of her novels, while the Black experience is mostly present, but not the defining feature of the characters. Black Stars is more variable in quality, but I loved Victor LaValle’s We Travel the Spaceways, which brilliantly plays with the reader’s expectations.

There were three books from Africa: the first, Aya Vol. 1: Life in Yop City, was my graphic novel for the month. It’s a gently enjoyable book, with soap opera-style shenanigans interesting mainly because of the glimpses of an Africa which we rarely see in the West/North. Like the other African books, it includes some wonderful sayings and proverbs — “You can’t satisfy an empty belly by not taking a crap.” Glory is a complete contrast: a big book dealing with big themes in an often cartoonish style, it still has huge emotional weight when required. Chipo Chung performs the audiobook brilliantly, exploiting the author’s use of repetition which might be less successful on the printed page. Less effective in this version, it must be said, are the social media-based sections, which are somewhat clumsy when read out. Devil on the Cross also makes great satirical use of cartoonish style in its depiction of the characters, though its repetition of content rather than style is sometimes wearying.

The Dorothy Richardson of the month, Clear Horizons, was not my favourite in terms of the writing style (sentences either too long or too short!), but there were still plenty of quotable pearls:

contributing, wherever he went, his qualities of strength and gentleness, gentle strength, strong gentleness

a life that had been a ceaseless stream of events set in a ceaseless stream of inadequate commentary without and within

Miriam on reading (Pilgrimage?):

nearly always, whether one feels capable or disqualified, reluctance to spend any more time on it, to sacrifice an indefinite portion of one’s brief leisure shut up and turned away from life.

They were the work of a superhumanly deedy female and could be lived up to only by an equally deedy female who, if indeed she did live up to them, would lead a dreary life.

most occasions are imperfect because no one is really quite within them, save before and afterwards; and then only at the price of solitude.

this habit, revealed to her by Hypo, of thinking about people in their presence and leaving her thoughts in her face

13 books finished this month, 11 of them from my Asian reading month; that helped me get to 12 by women/POC, with the usual 4 in German.

• Happy Stories, Mostly — Norman Erikson Pasaribu tr. Tiffany Tsao
• Frösche — Mo Yan tr. Martina Hasse
• Die Ungehaltenen — Deniz Utlu
• Aspects of Nature — Alexander von Humboldt tr. Elizabeth Juliana Leeves Sabine
• Arid Dreams — Duanwad Pimwana tr. Mui Poopoksakul
• Love in the Big City — Sang Young Park tr. Jan Henrik Dirks
• Moving Parts — Prabda Yoon tr. Mui Poopoksakul
• The Book of Human Insects — Osamu Tezuka tr. unknown
• Chinatown –Thuận tr. Nguyễn An Lý
• Dawn’s Left Hand — Dorothy M. Richardson
• Tomb of Sand — Geetanjali Shree tr. Daisy Rockwell
• Dschinns — Fatma Aydemir
• Diego Garcia — Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams

This month was a Tilted Axis festival, five of the books being theirs, while another (Love in the Big City) is published by them in English (I listened to the German version). This story of gay life in Seoul is structured around the narrator’s relationships with a series of largely unlikeable men, but the central character’s friendship with his flatmate keeps the reader’s interest, and the final pages are very moving.

Three of the Tilted Axis books were collections of stories. Happy Stories, Mostly (from Indonesia, and not obviously a reference to Alasdair Gray) also focuses on gay characters, but particularly on their difficult relationships with their families. Interpreting the title as “not quite happy stories” gives a better idea of the predominantly melancholy tone. There’s an interesting conversation between the author and translator at the end of the book, which sent me back to re-read some of the stories.

The other two collections are both translated from the Thai by Mui Poopoksakul. Moving Parts is splendidly zany, with a sense of unity generated by the theme of body parts in each of the stories; both books feature stories involving men having their penises cut off (not sure if this is coincidence or a particular element of Thai culture), but otherwise Arid Dreams is quite different: more traditional, realist with a feminist perspective, and with an empathy for characters on the lower rungs of Thai society.

Chinatown (from Vietnam) is written in an uncompromising style, rather Beckettian, using repetition and absurdism to “challenge and encourage the reader’s patience” (according to an interview). I’m certainly intrigued enough to look for more of Thuận’s work.

Finally, Tomb of Sand is an absolute romp — Joycean puns somehow translated from Hindi, tragedy balanced with comedy, and perspectives of crows and inanimate objects complementing those of the family members at the centre. The English translator of Love in the Big City, Anton Hur, mentioned in an interview that he was he was attracted to the book by the lack of western-centrism (“I can’t even tell you how revolutionary it is to even read an Asian gay book where the Asian gay protagonist isn’t paired with a white partner.”) Similarly, this book is not written with a western audience in mind, making it at times baffling (the references to Indian and Pakistani writers, for example), but all the more exhilarating.

My other favourite publisher, Fitzcarraldo, produced Diego Garcia, a patchwork of texts created by two writers — bearing some kind of relationship to the two authors of the book — who are trying to write about the scandal of the Chagos Islanders’ treatment, without appropriating their story. Their manic lives in Edinburgh and elsewhere are set against the dignity of the Chagossians, to great effect.

Suspect sexual politics was quite a feature of some books this month, with Frösche (China) a notable example. To his credit, Mo Yan has to walk a fine political line in a novel centring on the one-child policy, and for most of the novel he manages to portray characters on both sides of that line with sympathy. The later treatment of the main character seemed to me a cop-out, however, and the narrator, in an increasingly odd ending, beats up his wife, and then apparently realises the error of his ways after being himself beaten up by a street thief.

My graphic novel of the month was The Book of Human Insects (Japan), and it was certainly an interesting experience. The story of a young woman who takes on the talents of whoever she meets could have been very good, but we see very little of her implied talents, and a lot more of her physical charms (and she also get beaten up). The visual storytelling is full of energy, which compensates in part for the sketchy, uncredited translation.

From Germany, there were two novels focusing on the lives of Turkish (and Kurdish) Gastarbeiter. Die Ungehaltenen is an angry and compelling picture of the racism they face. The fringe characters, especially Onkel Cemal, are memorable, though the central pair struck me as underwritten: it’s not clear what the narrator or the love-interest really see in each other. Dschinns seemed to me more successful, exploring each member of the family in turn. It’s a devastating portrait, but there’s hope at least that the younger generation are not making the same mistakes as their parents. The mother recalls Jeanette Winterson’s (“Why be happy when you could be normal?”):

Warum reden die Kinder staendig vom Gluecklichsein? … Warum wollen sie immer, dass man gluecklich ist? Kann man nicht einfact normal sein? Warum reicht das nicht?

Finally the two non-Asian books: Aspects of Nature provides a fascinating insight into the state of scientific knowledge in Humboldt’s time. What he got wrong, he got wrong for intelligent reasons; here wondering why the Mediterranean countries have relatively little vegetation:

The great catastrophe which occasioned the formation of the Mediterranean, when the swollen waters of what was previously an immense lake burst through the barriers of the Dardanelles and of the Pillars of Hercules, appears to have stripped the adjacent countries of a large portion of their coating of vegetable mould.

And explaining how fossils of tropical plants are found in temperate countries:

It may be that in the Ancient World, exhalations of heat issuing forth through the many openings of the deeply fissured crust of the globe may have favoured, perhaps for centuries, the growth of palms and tree-ferns and the existence of animals requiring a high temperature, over entire countries where now a very different climate prevails.

The month’s instalment of Pilgrimage centres on Miriam’s relationships with Hypo Wilson and Amabel, the first finally consummated, but the later involving far more genuine feeling. Richardson is infinitely quotable as always:

But he would understand that discovery about oneself is impersonal, as well as personal, like a discovery in chemistry.

the kindly humanity most of the Lycurgans possessed only as a dogma with which to bludgeon their opponents.

Miriam rhapsodises on the doors of her boarding house:

The state bedroom behind it, whose door moved discreetly on its hinges over a fairly thickish carpet and shut with a light, wooden sound. The door of the little draughty room at the end of the passage, clapping abruptly to over its thin linoleum with a comfortless metallic rattle of its loose fastening. … All beloved. For a moment she listened to the prolonged squeak, running cheerfully up the scale and ceasing suddenly as the door stood wide, that was the voice of her old garret.

Miriam empathises with dental patients:

by those moments in the chair when publicly, in one’s own hearing and that of another, one’s hardest tissues, mysteriously stricken, are ground away, of bodily failure and ultimate dissolution.

The ugliest word in the language:

Egypt. Neither the sound nor the sight of the word was lovely. Written, with its three differently tailed letters properly joined, it was unmanageable: the tails competed. In the whole written language surely no word was more difficult to beautify. The opening sound uglier even than ‘cheese,’ the pouting spit of the conclusion: hopeless.

Poor men:

giving women the reputation for scandal-mongering from which most men are free only by reason of their social blindness and incapacity

Miriam struggling socially:

of herself who could not be counted upon to follow even the most unmistakable clue, and had the socially inconvenient habit of going off on long journeys and leaving her thoughts in her face.

Next month is Black History Month (British/Irish version), so that will be my main focus….