Star 111 by Lutz Seiler

Star 111 by Lutz Seiler

German fiction

Original title -Stern 111

Translator – Tess lewis

Source – Library copy

I remember this was shown a lot around Twitter or whatever it is called now(I hate calling it x wtf does that mean, really ). Anyway, rant over. So it was all over as it was one of the first two books from and other stories to have their new design, which is very eye-catching and unique. I had intended to read Lutz Seiler a few years ago when Kruso came out, but a mishap and the proof I was sent to my old address, and I never got a replacement but when I read this, and it took me back to the time in the early 90s in Germany, it seemed a perfect read for me and also I felt it maybe would be a booker book it is a while since I finished it and now I think it may actually be more of an IFFP book but it does capture that time just after the Berlin wall fell so well. Anyway I would still like see it on the longlist myself.

A man stepped out onto the street heading toward the city center and raised his arm. It was three o’clock in the morning. Without a word of thanks, he got in the car and leaned back in the seat.

They drove for a time without engaging in conversation. “Stop just up ahead,” the man ordered and stuck a bill rolled into a cylinder the size of a cigarette between the heating vent louvers on the dashboard. Carl had heard about illegal cabs, but never imagined it would be so easy.

Just before Alexanderplatz, he turned onto a street that seemed suitable at first glance. It was called Linien Strasse.Only two streetlamps were working in the first hundred meters, and Carl parked the Zhiguli somewhere in the half-light between them.

Carl as he heads in to Berlin and thos names and places that we have seen so often in books and films about Berlin.

Star11 follows the outcome of the wall falling through the prism of one family. When the wall falls what happens when the parents want to go west and seek a life in the West and the son here wants to stay in. the east.. What follows is wjhat happens when Inge and Walter end up leaving the son Carl behind in East GermanyThey call him baxck from his studies to his home town of Thüringham where they tell him they are going west. His father kleaves behin=d his Car a russian Zhiguli or as we knew them Lada’s bck in the day. Carl ends up as a bit iof a Jack the Lad; he is eventually drawn to Berlin and the anarchy scene there he ends up as a Squatter and becomes friends with his fellow squatters. Carl who was a bricklayer. Starts to run an illegal taxi service. His life is interspersed with snippets of his parents and how they fair in the West. as they go from place to place. Their son is drawn by a different world of poetry and life in East Berlin as the wall falls and the corner is turned and many people flow into East berlin drawn by the cheap and vacant properties left behind by those heading west.

The first letter seemed to have been written in a state of great agitation and confusion. It contained a fragmented description of her first stops in the West, a muddled sequence of places, which Carl later tried to untangle in a sketch. What emerged was the image of a large circular movement over hundreds of kilometers, first northwards to the Dutch border, then back southwards along the Rhine, “our emigration”” as his mother had begun calling it. Carl pinned the page with his topographical sketch above his workbench, next to the flute player: “The Way of My Parents.”

This made me think of where I lived at the time which was five miles from the DAutch border and not far from the Rhine

This is a classic come of age in fact it has a nod to Gunter Grass I felt in the style of the writing. He is one of the voices of the Wende generation that grew up when the wall fell. Like Clemens Meyer he uses hius own life he was a bricklayer and he went ot East Berlin and his won parent took that trek through the west to settle and find there new home. This is from the era of films like Goodbye lenin, the Follow up to Wings of Desire wherwe see Berlin after the Wall has fallen the madness of the place chaotic and full of possiblites and we see this in  Carls world. In an interview, he says you must invent to tell a true story using authentic start points to retell the times. He mixes his own life with the world he lives and sees. I felt this captured a time that is now part of history wreally fresh in my own mind was the wall falling and spending time in Germany not long after the wall fell. I feel he captures a time that has long gone well a different world. Have you read Lutz Seiler ?

Winstons score – A one of two books I held back to review and want see on the longlist most.