What Darkness was by Inka Parei

German fiction

Original title – Was Dunkelhiet war

Translator – Katy Derbyshire

Source – personal copy\

I move over to Germany with my latest book for Woman in Translation month. This book won the Ingeborg Bachmann prize and is the second book I have reviewed from the writer Inka Parei. Having studied sociology, political science and sinology as a student. I love the phrase on the English translation of her Wiki pages, which describes her as a writer with the ethos of quality over quantity in her writing. So far, she has published three novels. This is the second I have reviewed Cold Centre by her, and her debut is called Shaow Boxer. They have all been published by Seagull Books. I picked this for today because it was one of those occasions when you read books within a short time and talk to each other, and this is the case. This book, like yesterday’s reviews for Yell, if you still can, also has a man nearing his death, and, like that book, it sees him looking back on his life.

The old man lowered his binoculars, his hands trembling. He had rough, sturdy hands covered in age spots and white patches devoid of pigment, the veins raised visibly beneath the skin. He had the furrowed hands of a man who does physical work even though he had never really done hard labour; he’d worked at the post office.

He could almost hear the hissing sound the leather of the belt made as it slid out of the loops. The younger of the two girls risked a glance outside, which suddenly grew long, hesitant, as if she had seen him. Then she turned away and ran to the door and someone extinguished the light.

This piece remind me of my grandfather he would watch comings and goings when he was alive

We meet an unnamed narrator who has collapsed in bed, and what follows is him thinking over what had just happened. He saw a stranger on the stairs, a series of odd doors fitted by one of his neighbours. This is September 1977, a period in West German history where the past of the country and the future were on fire. This is the time of the Badder Meinhof, kidnappings and general unrest and uncertainty. As he takes to his bed he also thinks back to the war years and how he end up in this city and with this house. Past and present mix as he tries to find out who the stranger on the stairs is. A man dying with this last puzzle and the question of his own dark past.A book that covers those twenty-odd post-war years that led to the events of that year. One man’s thoughts as he is near death. Who is the stranger? What is happening?

It took him a moment to notice the stranger. The old man was standing on the second step, lost in thought and annoyed at himself, and looking distractedly down at where the end of the stairs vanished into the darkness of a small reception room. A few patches of light from the lamp in the yard fell through the door. There was a zinc pail against one wall, next to it a scrubbing brush.

A deaning cloth had been spread out over the pail and had dried into shape draped over the edge. Someone had knocked it off and now it lay inverted, pointlessly mimicking the opening of the bucket, on the doormat.

He saw the tips of two shoes and knees swathed in grey flannel, and it was not until then that he recognized the rest, the whole of the man sitting against the wall with his legs drawn up, apparently unconscious or asleep.

The moment he saw the stranger that he questions through the book.

I love her writing, and Katy Translation Ikna Parei is a sparse writer who gets to the soul and haunting past of her country. She has a nod or maybe is from the same style of writing as Herta Müller. That feeling of mystery is strong in this book. Unanswered questions, dark pasts, we never quite see it all, and that is okay because this is one man’s vision of those years and what was happening in the late summer of 1977. This is one of the reasons I love Seagull books they bring us voices we would never see this is a delicate book well written a gem of a read that can be easily read in an evening that captures the country at that time and what had brought it there in some ways. Have you read this or any other books from Seagulls book’s German list? They have brought some great books out.

Winstonsdad scored A. I just need to get ahold of her debut novel, Shadow Boxer; as this writer, I enjoy reading.