Month: November 2025

Nearly the end of 2025 the November round up

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  1. Blue Night by Simone Buchholz
  2. War Diary by Ingeborg Bachmann
  3. war primer by Alexander Kluge
  4. The cafe with no name by Robert Seethaler 
  5. The other girl by Annie Ernaux
  6. Everytime we say goodbye by Ivana Sajko
  7. Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann 
  8. Headbirths or The Germans are Dying Out by Gunter Grass
  9. The Wax Child by Olga Ravn 

I managed nine reviews last month. The first three books saw me revisiting a Detective in Hamburg, then a slim work around the war from a great writer at the start of his career. Then a work from a writer around another war at the end of a very long Career. See a trio of German writers. Then we headed to Austria for a Cafe in the corner of a market in Vienna. A book about a gfhost sister from a Nobel winner. A man on a train tries to forget all he has seen and just drifts off into Berlin. Then a famous Character from Goethe reconnects with him many years later, after their lives went in different directions. Günter Grass has a look at his homeland via a couple in Asia in the late 1970s. Then a wax doll narrates a witch hunt in 17th-century Denmark.

Book of the month

The Other girl by Annie Ernaux

I read this on a hard day, and it reminded me what an escape a book can be and what a great writer Annie Eernaux as she again takes apart her own families past in a short book about a sister she never knew.

Non-book things life in general

I had a tough time when Amanda had her stents done at the start of the month. I always struggle when the clocks. Go back. I love long summer night. So, with that, and a bad cold for me in the last week as the weather turned a little colder, which always seems to spark a sore throat and runny nose. But that has passed, and I have taken a few days and will not post a review until Monday now. Other than that, my TV watching has been what I would call comfort food, as I have watched the Aurora Teagarden Mysteries; in fact, I still have a few to watch. These hallmark mysteries are easy to watch and have helped me chill recently. I returned to work in the middle of the month, as I had been off since Amanda’s heart attack, so life is slowly getting there. I now take our days one day at a time. Thankful to have my darling wife still there. A bright spot today was the Record Store Day releases. I treated myself to some records

 

First off, a 10-inch from The Nationals, Mett Berninger, with four tracks from his last Album, live. I have his Album as well as most of The Nationals’ records. The second is a collection of tracks by Wilco and Jeff Tweedy from the last 15 years, all released on dBpm. A collection of rarties.I am a huge Wilco fan and Tweedy as well I recently got his new triple album.

Next, some very early Talking Heads sessions. I was late to Talking Heads, maybe getting into them in the mid-90s, but they made some outstanding records, and it’s interesting to hear how different this early stuff was. Then a live set from 1994 by Carter USM, a pop-punk band that had a great turn in its lyrics, with a lot of clever wordplay and good social commentary at the time. In fact, they could do with coming back. I wonder what titles they come up with for their songs now.

Next month

I needed to clear a backlog of books read, awaiting review, which currently stands at 7 books. I am slowly working through Tom’s Crossing, and I am in no hurry to finish this book, so don’t expect a review until next year. To supplement that, I have several shorter books I want to read before the end of the year, but I have no list or order for them. They are on my trolley downstairs, and a few are here in my reading room, so we will see what I get too. What are your plans to round off 2025?

Sorry I’m taking things slow

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As ever I press on a post saying I’ll stop blogging and within mins I remember the things I love be honest I just need to slow down a bit and get back into enjoying reading again as I’m a bit out of love with it at the moment

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn

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The Wax Child by Olga Ravn

Danish fiction

Original title – Voksbarnet

Translator – Martin Aitken

Source -Personal copy

The blog has shrunk so much it means I buy a lot more books than I used to in fact in a way. I hated asking for books and only got sent books from people who just sent them to me or asked me. I always hated asking and rarely do now. Hebnce in recent time a lot of the books I read are books i buy which means on the whole they are books I want to read or books I want give the writer another chance the larter is the case with this I think when we read the employees for theshadow booker international a few years ago . I was’t the biggest fan of employees. I like some of the prose style and the way you could capture even in the translationwho seemed to be human and who was artifical in fact in the few years since the book it is maybe more apt as a story with the jump in ai or thou I still find the use of the word AI isn’t right it is still just complex algorthims and compiled information worked together is that thought I think not but that is just me anyway I am drifting. The reason this appealed to me is the fact that I love old witch tales from the witch trials in the US, to women buried under stones on beaches in Scotland, through things like the Pendle witches. There was something mad about this time in the world. So when  I found out Olga Ravn had looked into the case of Christenze Ktuckow and came up with this novel

Whenever a woman nearby was about to give birth, a messenger would make haste to the midwife and whoever else the pregnant woman had asked to help.

All let go then of whatever was in their hands, and came as quickly as they could. Some in the night, others in the frost of morning; with fleetness of foot they came, and barely inside the door would take upon them the housekeeping. They would introduce a new and temporary regime, which meant that those who normally frequented the house would have to find new places to stay. I saw these women form a ring around the one in labour and lead her to the bath house. I saw them douse the burning-hot rocks with water; I saw the steam and the scalding herbs. They undressed the birthing woman, and the naked one was Anne Bille, the young mistress of Nakkebølle. And by the stone wall of the bath house they had placed me in the ground, and I lay and listened there as Anne Bille gave birth to the first of her children.

because she didn’t want a child she was considered dangerous

The novel has a narrator that isn’t human, a lump of beeswax in the form of a human child. That Chistenze had made and carried around. Add to that she seemed to have no interest in the local men or settling down, and married, this was enough in the 17th century for her to be considered a witch. What this is about is fear and prejudice, as Christenze and her friends are seen as outsiders for their views. Added to this, about the time she makes the doll, A lot of strange shit happens. We have what always happens. She tries to escape to the city, but this makes things worse. But it is also about a woman in love with other women at a time that was a totally unthinkable idea. But this could be set to any modern situation, being Trans, being an immigrant, just not fitting in. What she has done is wonderful: she has made a tale set in the past that shows us now what is so wrong. It is also told in a broken style of crumbs and fragments, often with very visceral words.

I saw in the night cats leave the church in droves, I saw them conduct themselves with swine in the street, and I saw the gravedigger in the churchyard puff on a cabbage pipe; I saw in a single vision the town’s fleas in all their thousands, I saw blood in small and large quantities, I saw barley porridge and the insipid salt herring. I saw funeral pyres and body parts displayed on the square as a deterrent. I saw money change hands and land be par-celled out, I saw humans bought and sold, lace underneath a skirt. I saw brother turn against brother, and mother against daughter. I saw hearts thirst for revenge and hands that craved for violence. This was not Nakke-bølle, it was not even Funen; shudders ran even through my hardy wax, this was Aalborg, 1616, city of hate.

there is just a beauty in her writing style here and Aitkens translation of it

This is a book remarkable for this time of year, a sort of neo horror with a lot of folklore and fear dropped in. It has a very fragmentary structure to it. But it also has a dark ending of what happens to these women. This is an accurate tale. This happened, and this is what grabbed me: one of my favourite albums is Giles Gorey, a farmer who was killed in Salem, famous for his last word More weight as he was crushed between two boards. What these tales show that then it was being a witch that got people killed. Being Gay would get you killed through time. Now, just wanting to find a better life will get you killed. We live in a time where witch hunts still happen, but we don’t call them witch hunts. Group Panic and fear, we think the dark ages have gone, we are heading headlong back into them !!! Anyway, if you want a thought-provoking and different book about one woman’s life told from a wax doll she made herself, this is the book for you. Safe say I am now more of a fan of Ravn;’s books. Have you read this ?

 

 

 

Headbirths or The Germans are Dying Out by Gunter Grass

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Headbirths or The Germans are Dying Out by Gunter Grass

German fiction

Original title – Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus

Translator – Ralph Manheim

Source – Personal Copy

I am a great believer in Fate and Books. I don’t know what it is, but I often seem to find the right book for the right occasion out of the blue. That was the Case with this book I think it is safe to say that Grass’s less well-known Novel came out in 1980, and maybe it is a book very much of its time, and also a book that fits well with the books I have reviewed over the years from Grass, as it is right in the middle of the books I have reviewed. I feel given the politics of the time in Germany, especially a couple of event,s led to the book. Grass himself was working on a script and travelled in Asia at the same time the book was set, and there is a lot of tension at the time after the CDU chancellor had called left-wing intellectuals like Grass Rats and blowflies.

In addition to my lecture on “The German Literatures’ and my novel The Flounder, I took three pages of jottings on the Headbirths theme along with me on our Asian trip. In every city we stopped in I read simple chapters from The Flounder: how Amanda Woyke introduced the potato into Prussia. This eighteenth-century fairy tale is timely in present-day Asia, in regions, for instance, where attempts to complement the exclusive cultivation of rice with other crops (maize, soybeans) are frustrated by the obstinate resistance of the peasants, until a Chinese or Javanese Amanda Woyke …

I read my notes on Headbirths during the outbound flight and larded them with additions. But not until my return to the narrows of German life do my slips fall out of my portfolio: my teacher couple from Itzehoe, Dörte and Harm Peters, have survived my evasions and counter-projects. They’re still getting ready for their trip.

Grass is in the book as well I reviewed The Flounder a few years ago

This is maybe the oddest book from Grass, it has so many levels to it. First, it is a couple travelling around Asia on a tour. This sets up another line of thought, as the German couple is loosely based on Grass. He had gone to Asia at the time and, like the Harm and Dorte as they head through India China and Indonesia. Then along side this is a thread about Germany and Germ,ans in the future how will the country itself be shaped in 80 years time will there still be Germans or will they the Germans be gone? Also along side this they are thinking of making a film this adds another layer to the book as scenes are imagined as the go around various countries.

Eighty million restless Germans transformed into a billion Germans in a state of unrest. Among them the proportionate number of Saxons and Swabians. What a population explosion! An epic fare-up. A ferment. What makes them so restless? What are they looking for? God? The absolute number? The meaning behind meaning? Insurance against nothingness?

They want at last to know themselves. They ask themselves and, dangerously in need of help, ask their neighbors, who, measured against the German plethora, have shrunk to pygmy nations:

Who are we? Where are we from? What makes us Germans? And what in Cod’s name is Germany?

Since the Germans, even a billion strong, are as thorough as ever, they set up several deeply echeloned national commissions of inquiry, which work at cross purposes. Imagine the paper con-sumption, the jurisdictional disputes among the various provinces and Germanys. They’re so intent on the organizational setup that they’ve already lost sight of its purpose.

The thinking about what may fall Germany in the future

So what we have is an odd book that is very mich of its time. Even a lot of the ways things are talked about seem very outdated. Burt in other ways the thoughts around over population and identity maybe ring more true now than they did at the time this was written Grass . This is ocvershadow by the comments Franz Josef Strauss made there is a feel this is a novel polemic against those comments but also you can see how this tripo to Asia had effect grass himself.the boom in the birth rate in Asia na dht decline in the European birth rate at the time is shadowed in the title of the book itself.I can see whyt this book is less well known . But I think Grass himself over the time I have done this blog is a figure that has in the decade or so since he died maybe faded from the conversation about German Lit like his fellow writer Heiunrich Bôll for me in my fifties they were esential reading but the fall of East Germany is a distant memory now. Have any of you readthis odd little

book thyat is part novel , part essay , part polemic , part travelogue and  autobiography ?

Make a note in Your Diary for Hungarian Lit month Feb 2026

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A couple of years ago, I did a Czech Lit month that was a success. I had thought of doing that again next year, but with the recent Nobel Prize win by László Krasznahorkai, I realised I hadn’t read enough books from Hungary this year; a mere 17 is a poor showing. Especially when I had a look at the list of Hungarian writers on Wikipedia. To find the depth of books that have come from Hungary over the years. I have the recent Peter Nadas memoir, Shimmering, on my TBR, along with two books by Andrea Tompa, Home and Omerta, plus a few books from Krasznahorakai to read and review. A real resource for this month is the Hungarian literature online. There are two good publishers bringing books out from Hungary, the first is Seagull Books, which has a Hungarian list edited by Krasznahorkai translator Ottilie Mulzet . Then, a publisher that has brought some lost gems to light is Contra Mundum Press. But there are also books from the likes of Pushkin Press, NYRB, and gems scattered through other publishers. I am planning to read shimmering details and the two Tompa books, and I hope to get a few other books from Seagull and Contra Mundum books I have my eye on the two vols of Prae. Do you have a favourite book from Hungary or a writer?

Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann

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Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann

German Fiction

Original title – Lotte in Weimar

Translator H T Lowe-Poter

Source – Library book

I move into the week of doing work from Thomas Mann, and I have only read a few books from Mann over the years, and this is the first one I will have on the blog. I am awaiting the two new translations of Magic Mountain due out next year. So I checked the library system and found two books. As I say, I know very little about Man and other than he spoke out about the Nazis, and he won the Nobel prize. I did read the book by Britta Bôhler about when Thomas Mann made his decision to denounce the Nazis regime a book worth reading. I am planning to read the two new translations of The Magic Mountain later next year. It is rare to get two new translations of such a great book in a couple of years.

Never in all my life, I confess it, has it been my privilege to perform a service so near to my heart as today’s, so worthy to be set down and enshrined in the tables of my memory. I knew, indeed, without knowing, as a man will, that the admired female, the original of that immortally lovely creature, still dwelt amongst us – in the city of Hannover, to be precise. Ah, yes, I knew, but only now am I aware that I knew. For my knowledge had no reality here-tofore; never would it have entered my head that I might one day stand in her sacred presence, face to face. Never could I have dreamt of such a thing. When this morning – but a few short hours since – I awoke, it was in the conviction that today was like a hundred others, to be filled with the wonted activities of my calling: waiting at table, keeping my eye over the house. My wife – for I am married, Frau Councillor, my life-partner occupies a superior post in the kitchens of the establishment – my wife would tell you that I had no presen-timent of anything out of the ordinary.

She comes from Hanover to see him

 

Any, he pays homage, it’s Homage I’m not sure, but he goes back to the remarkable life of the German writer Goethe and imagines the inspiration for one of his main characters in the Sorrows of Young Werther. Charlotte Keshtner, the woman who had a relationship with Goethe forty years earlier, is returning to Weimar to meet him, now an admired man. She is of course now the lotte of the story and this is what drives the book the reunion of ther two and how those around Weimar in his circle take to her returing to confront him a little avbout how she had come off in the book. The sparks that fly when old loves meet after forty years. How time makes people different. This is a book that has a lot of the chatting between the two, how they have changed over time, and how he is viewed as a figure in Weimar at the time.

‘That one that says: “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” We are here, dearest lady, once more arrived at the subject of tyranny. Not a harsh tyranny, but a natural one, probably inseparable from a certain dominating greatness; one does well to condone and respect it, while not actually yielding to its behests. He is great, and old, and little inclined to value what comes after him. But life goes on, it does not stop even at the greatest, and we are children of the new life, we Muselines and Julemuses, a new stock, not at all sentimental nanny-goats. We are independent and progressive minds, with the courage of the new times and new tastes.

Already we have found and love new gods: painters like the good Cornelius, and Overbeck – I have heard the master say he would like to fire a pistol at his pictures – and the heavenly David Caspar Friedrich, of whom Goethe says he might just as well look at his paintings upside down. “It should not be allowed!” he thunders. Real Jovian thunder, of course; we in our Muses’ Circle just let it rumble away – in all respect, of course, while we copy down Uhland’s verses in our poetry note-books and enchant ourselves with reading aloud the splendid grotesque tales of Hoffmann?

“I do not know these authors, Charlotte said soberly. “You do not mean to say that with all their grotesquerie they can rival the works of the author of Werther?

As I said there is a lot of talking about Art and Life

This is a book about art and what art does. Charlotte is forever held in the book, but her and Goethe’s lives have taken very different paths, and this reunion is what happens when your life has been captured in a book and the fallout of that. But it is also a book about how big Goethe was and how his books shaped lives and the world around him. He is a writer I need to read more of I think this maybe isn’t the best intro to Mann it is very conversationheavy book it is a thoughtful book about a wreiter and the art that surrounds a writer. But also about how lives cross at specific points and then, a year later, meet again, and how their lives can be different in so many ways. I am planning to read more of Mann over the next few years. As I always say, I need to add a lot of depth to the classic writers from around the world. Have you read Mann ?

Every time we say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko

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Everytime we say goodbye by Uvan Sajko

Croatian fiction

Original title – Male smrti

Translator – Mima Simic

source – Review copy

I was kindly sent this to review. It is the second novel to be published in English translation by the Croatian Novelist and Playwright Ivana Sajko. She is much better known for her plays that highlight female voices and social issues, and use inventive narrative styles. Her previous novel won a German translation prize. This book has a male character as its lead, but, like her other works, has a breadth to the subject it covers, which, inj many ways, is one man’s experience of various events and situations within the second half of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st century.One man’s view of the Balkan war and what came after.

I start writing on the train, on my journey from point A to point B, from that small coastal town to Berlin, I stare out the window at the remnants of the city, the unfinished houses in the suburbs, the warehouses in the industrial zone and the stunted trees along the river, torn plastic bags hanging from their branches like bats, it’s hard for me to be in this compartment, hard to be in this skin, in the role of a traveller, I have forgotten how to travel, how to surrender myself to the mercy of the road, how to say good-bye, I have forgotten how long you actually stand there looking back at point A as it rapidly disappears, and then how long you just keep standing there, just standing and standing, staring into nothingness, about to cry, so I open my notebook but I have no answer, I write ‘On the journey from point A to point B, from that small coastal town to Berlin, I stare out the window at the remnants of the city, the unfinished houses in the suburbs, the warehouses in the industrial zone and the stunted trees along the river…

As he starts off on the train journey

 

The book follows a man who has left an unnamed Balkan seaside town to head on a train journey to Berlin, as he says to lose himself in the crowds of Berlin to just become a stranger in the crowd as the train heads from the Balkans into Berlin, we see him sat reflecting not only on his own past but also on his brother who fell in with the wrong crowd and end uop dead, to his drunken father and mother that put up with all this. He sees the Balkan war when he is younger, he is a journalist and activist, this leads him to conflicts over borders, shipwrecks as he tries to shine a light on those suffering but there is a sense of this man is broken as we get these memories following as the train move closer nad he has rthe chance to just walk lout of the station into the crowd and be a face in a crowd.

What do you do when you sink into an image you saw on the news, in the papers, an image you thought you knew well, only to be suddenly confronted with someone’s wound or burn, the kind that can’t heal or be eased by compassion, and one day this might be me, for another’s death holds the possibility of my own just as another’s death is the undeniable proof of my life, which, as I viscerally marvel at these fundamental contrasts, now separates me from death, but I’m not the one who’s dying at this mo-ment, by incident or design, as a calculated collateral casu-alty, not yet; I am lying in bed pulling up reports by Aris Messinis from Mosul, then Shah Marai from Kabul, then Abdulmonam Eassa from Ghouta; as Russian planes launch an airstrike on the eastern part of the city on behalf of the Assad regime, Eassa hops into an ambulance heading to the site of a strike, where a father and son lie in flames by an overturned motorcycle in the middle of the street, and Eassa helps the Civil Defence put out the fire consuming their bodies, ‘It’s very, very hard, he says,

‘I take pictures, but it hurts, some photos are blacked out

The strain and stress of photographing and reporting on the violence in the world

This is one of those books I call a small epic; it is 120-something pages long, but it feels epic as we see glimpses into the unnamed man’s life through his family dynamics and the effect they have on him. But also the Balkan conflict and the person who made him the Journalist he became after the war, a champion of those without a voice, but there is a toll to pay for this, and this is why he is on this train heading to oblivion. For me, you can tell Ivana Sajko is known for her narrative style in her plays. This felt at times as if the book drifts the way your mind does on a train, that sort of remembrance of the past, maybe the wanting to escape is making him replay these events, but it also shows the effect of the last decades on one man. I was reminded of the poems of Faruk Šehić, the Bosnian poet, who also has people from the Balkan conflict wash up in Berlin. A city to get lost in to be a face in a crowd to see out your ghosts. Have you read this book ?

You can buy the two books mentioned in the Uk via my bookshop.org link for

Everytime we say good bye by Ivana Sajko 

My Rivers by Faruk Šehić

 

 

 

 

The other girl by Annie Ernaux

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The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux

French memoir

Original title – L’Autre Fille

Translator – Alison L. Strayer

Source – Personal copy

I always talk about how it is like returning to a piece of gossip or a great story from an old friend, reading a book by Annie Ernaux. This will be the eighth book I have reviewed on the blog. The first was in 2014, back before Fitzcarraldo and before the Nobel win. Anyway, when this fell onto the doormat at Winston Towers, it was short enough for me to just read it that day, which I did, in fact, read twice over two days. As ever, she opens up about her life. In fact, this isn’t just her life; it is a corner of her parents’ life and a secret they thought she had never known about the other girl, the earlier daughter they had before her.

It is a sepia photo, oval-shaped, glued inside a yellowed cardboard folder, showing a baby posed in three-quarter profile on a heap of scalloped cushions. The infant wears an embroidered nightdress with a single, wide strap to which a large bow is attached, just behind the shoulder, like a big flower or the wings of a giant butterfly. The body is long and not very fleshy. The legs are parted and stretch out towards the edge of the table. Under the brown hair, swept up in a big curl over the protuberant forehead, the eyes are wide and staring with an almost devouring inten-sity. The arms, open like those of a baby doll, seem to be flailing, as if the child were about to leap from the table.

Below the photo, the signature of the photographer (M.

Ridel, Lillebonne), whose intertwined initials also appear in the upper left-hand corner of the front cover, which is heavily soiled and coming unglued.

When I was little, I believed – I must have been told –

that the baby was me. It isn’t me, it’s you.

There was another photo, taken by the same photogra-pher, of me on the same table with my brown hair pulled up in the same sort of roll, but I appear to be plump, with deep-set eyes in a round chubby face, my hand between my thighs. I don’t remember ever being puzzled by the – obvious – differences between the two photos.

It opens as she sees photos of Ginette

I can see why it took this long to write this well, 14 years ago, as it means most ot the people in her family that may have been upset about her writing about this were gone. The book sees her looking back at the other girl, the other siste,r the ghost sister that she never knew about, Ginette, the sister who had died many years before Annie was born it was one day in the shop her parents’ old shop, that she caught a brief conversation between her mother and a regular customer about the other girl and how she was nicer than her what other girl. Over the years, she gets a little bit more of other family members; nothing more of her parents, but later she finds pictures of Ginette years before she was born. This is one sister trying to find out about the other girl, the sister who died of Diphtheria many years before she was born. Something she should have had if they had known. An epitaph for a girl she never knew, but has maybe haunted her, and what her mother said about her being nicer than the other girl.

I cannot put an exact date to that summer Sunday, but I’ve always thought it was in August. Twenty-five years ago, while reading the journal of Cesare Pavese, I discovered he’d committed suicide in a hotel room in Turin on

27 August 1950. I immediately checked – it was a Sunday.

Since then, I’ve imagined it was the same Sunday.

It grows more distant every year – but that is an illu-sion. There is no time between you and me. There are words that have never changed.

Nice. I think I already knew that the word could not be applied to me, judging from the terms my parents used each day to describe me, according to my behaviour: bold, scruffy little madam, greedy, Miss Know-It-All, nasty girl, you’ve got the devil in you. But their reproaches rolled off my back, so sure was I of being loved by them, the proof of which I saw in their constant concern for little me, in addition to their gifts. I was an only child and spoiled on that account, always at the top of my class without making any effort, and in short, I felt I had the right to be what I was.

When she heard what her Mother had said in passing

This is what she does so well, or as the Nobel committee said, for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory. She looks and takes apart her own past. A ghost of a sister in these forty pages is there. She never knew her. These are the breadcrumbs, the watermarks, the dust of a child that died, and maybe had she not, would Annie have been Annie? They always say life is stranger than fiction, and time,e and time again, Ernaux shows us this in her writng. Her art is the art of self, of family, of the secrets every family carries in its background. This is a short book, not even fifty pages, but it hits hard and is one I will be rereading for many a year.

in the uk you can buy this book via this link 

 

 

The Cafe with no Name by Robert Seethaler

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The Cafe with no Name by Robert Seethaler

Austrian fiction

Original title – Das Café ohne Namen

Translator – Katy Derbyshire

Source – Personal copy

I am having a quieter German lit month this year. I am just reviewing a few books, and this is set in Vienna, where the writer is from. I have reviewed two earlier books by Robert Seethaler. I see on the book cover that this was a best-selling book for a long time. That made me wonder what makes different books and writers more and less successful around Europe and what type of books are popular with readers. I think Seethaler captures the other side of human life in his fellow Austrian writer, Thomas Bernhard. This is a group of people, but their lives are looked at; they could have come from the cheap eaters, but this is a more compassionate look at the people you may see in a market Cafe.

Robert Simon opened his café at twelve noon on the dot.

The first customer came in less than ten minutes later.

Simon knew him vaguely; he was a fruit grower from the Wachau who sometimes rented a gap between the stalls on the eastern side to sell his apricots straight out of a basket. He sat down at one of the outside tables and fixed doleful eyes on the pavement.

‘What can I get you? Simon asked, an apron tied around his waist and a pencil behind his ear. The fruit grower looked surprised.

‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You work on the market.’

‘Not any more,’ said Simon.

‘What have you got? the man asked.

‘Coffee. Lemonade. Raspberry soda, beer, and wine from Stammersdorf and Gumpoldskirchen, red or white.

To eat, there’s bread and dripping with or without onions, freshly pickled gherkins or pretzel sticks??

‘Not a lot.’

‘It’s the first day. Anyway, it’s a café, not a restaurant.?

The first day of the cafe!

The book, as I said, is set in the mid-sixties through about a decade. It follows the years, Robert Simon, a man who had just lost his job in the market, when he is pointed out a cafe that hasn’t been open in years so when he gets the lease and opens it we meet those who come and go other the years into the cafe with no name as he initially he has no name for the cafe. The book sees the struggles when he opens the Cafe shortly after this Mila, a country girl who had headed to the city for work as a seamstress hads lost her job she was never great at her old job so when she fell and was taken into the cafe by the neighbour of the cafe, The Butcher a Johanes  Luckily, Robert talks about how hard it is, and she is put forward as a waitress for him. The book follows both Robert and Mila. As trade dries up in a winter he offers punch a wrestle Rene comes ion to the cafe more. He likes Mila. ADD to that other customers like an elderly couple, a widow, a man taken on as a handyman, and over the years ,we see the comings and goings of relationships start and fail, all connected to the cafe.

Mila was robust by nature. What she lacked in skill and dexterity in comparison to the other factory girls, she made up for in tenacity and diligence. She was reliable, wouldn’t get into escapades and, above all, steered clear of trade unions. If she went on that way, the deputy engineering manager Herr Steinwender said, she might even one day get a promotion to a full seamstress or – who could say what might be possible? – head seamstress.

Six days a week, Mila took the company-owned diesel bus to Floridsdorf in the early hours, bent low all day long over her juddering Singer machine in Hall 2, Row V, and was driven back home with a stiff back and aching fingers, only to make herself supper and get an early night.

Mila wasn’t a made seamstress but works as a waitress most of the time

I mentioned Bernhards as the Cheap eaters was something I thought about whilst reading this book, another group of people hard on luck but this is a look at the highs and lows nbut without the acid nature oifBernhard no there is something about the way Seethaler found dignity and beauty in the everyday action of these cafe customers and staff in the corner of a market over the decade or so as Post war Austria of the sixties turns the corner. The seventies come in, but this is a place caught in that changing world around them. There is something extraordinary about how Seethaler deals with his world. Bad things happen, but this is like the Sunday evening drama as we used to have bad things happen, but it is how it is told with that sort of nostalgic feel to it. This is called The Midwife, but in a Viennese market cafe. A cafe owner, a waitress, and the customers make up for the nurses and patients as we view the vignettes of their lives over the years. Have you read this book or any of his other books?

 

War Primer by Alexander Kluge

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War Primer by Alexander Kluge

German fiction

Original title – Kreigsfibel

Translator – Alexander Booth

Source – Personal copy

I am moving slowly this German lit month, and here is another gem of a book. If you have followed this blog for any amount of time, you will know I am a massive fan of the German writer, filmmaker, and Social critic. I have reviewed six other Kluge books over the last five or so years. In fact, this book, written in his nineties, connects to different books, as he is someone who saw the end of the Second World War and has witnessed the recent war in Ukraine. This book takes its title from a play by the playwright Bertolt Brecht, published around the Second World War. This is a companion piece to that book that ties Kluge’s own family life to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

In the early days of the Ukrainian war, there was a report of a certain number of villagers, including young people and children, holding up a Russian tank. After a period of hesitation, the tank driver put it in reverse and rolled back out of the village.

This is an urban legend. It was already making the rounds during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. During the 1991 coup in Moscow, the scene actually occurred several times and led to several tank divisions withdrawing from the city. In Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, however, the same kind of confrontation ended in a massacre.

The report in the case of Ukraine emphasized the bravery of the civilians who opposed the tank. But it takes two to tango, as it were, for an encounter to end happily: the determination of the residents, but also that of the young tank driver, perhaps all of 18, who put the tank in reverse.

The echoes of previous conflicts

 

The first thing you know if you read `Kluge is that his books are not linear or even have a plot. No, he uses a montage technique of writing short vignettes and fragments. For me, this is the filmmaker in him; those snippets stuck together may work as a cinema of writing. This book covers his recollections of the end of World War II. Those images of tanks echo both from the history he saw as a child and from what he knew in later life, tanks again crossing the Russian plains. The images of villagers in Ukraine stopping tanks in the early days remind him of Hungary and China, with both ends harsh. He has also included a lot more film in this book, available via a series of QR codes, to lend his words greater power and bring to life the anecdotes and tales he is retelling and reliving. The story of his hometown.

The soldiers in the Russian tank battalions are very young. In the evening, after a disappointing conclusion to battle, the leadership cannot stop them from looting. They lug furniture, carpets and valuables of all kinds into the trailers of their vehicles. Manage to pack the stuff into large, mailable parcels. Then the loot is tied up and transported to Belarus on trucks. From there, the goods are sent by post to the soldiers’ homes. When we investigate such shipments, we learn the names, home addresses and places of recruitment, and thus the origin of the predatory units. Once we have the names of the perpetrators and their superiors, we feed our information cannons with what makes the news relevant in terms of jus in bello, that is, justifiable conduct in war: the precise attribution of offences, simultaneously to single offenders and to military units. As I’ve always said: information is a more effective explosive projectile than any artillery ammunition.

The young russians sent to the front to die but also some looted

 

I always struggle to put over how much Kluge means to me as a reader. For me, this chap is maybe my own secret writer, no one really talks about. He is like Sebald if you cut out the fat of his books and just leave the meat, those little insights, those interconnecting vignettes, those images, repeating echoes of the past, echoes of war, repeating conflict after conflict. I love the montage he builds in his books. This is a man who is not only a writer but also one of the leading voices in German New Wave cinema. It is this that makes his bookls so different it is that viisual mind mioxed with the literary mind a rare type of writer. All this from a man in his 90s !! I’ll end with this excerpt from Laurence Binyon’s poem For the Fallen, which captures war in a few lines so well.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them!

 

War Diary by Ingeborg Bachmann

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War diary by Ingeborg Bachmann

German memoir

Original title – Krieg Tagebuch

Translator -Mike Mitchell

Source – Personal copy

I move from Crime fiction to Memoir —here it is: Memoir or just a snippet of history? I haven’t read any Ingeborg Bachmann, but I know she is an essential writer in German postwar writing. This comes from the end of the Second World War. After the war, she often questioned the role of the writer in post-war Germany. She wrote radio plays, librettos, short stories and her single novel Maluina. She also left some unfinished novels, and after her death, her work was published at the end of the war in Vienna, including a relationship she had with a British soldier stationed there and his letters when he fist was relocated to Italy and then Palestine

My mind’s still in a whirl. Jack Hamesh was here, this time he came in a jeep. Naturally, everyone in the village stared and Frau S. came over the stream twice to have a look in the garden. I took him into the garden because Mummy’s in bed upstairs. We sat on the bench and at first I was all of a tremble so that he must have thought I’m mad or have a bad conscience or God knows what. And I’ve no idea why. I can’t remember what we talked about at first but all at once we were on to books, to Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig and Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal. I was so happy, he knows everything and he told me he never thought he’d find a young girl in Austria who’d read all that despite her Nazi upbringing. And suddenly everything was quite different and I told him everything about the books. He told me he was taken to England in a kindertransport with other Jewish children in ’38, he was actually eighteen then but an uncle managed to arrange it, his parents were already dead.

He was from Vienna and connect over there love of books

This is a complex piece to describe, as it is a very slim book —100 pages, forty of which are an afterword —and the first two sections are snippets from Bachman’s diary in the dying embers of World War II. She is afraid that, as the Russians are nearly there, she is scared of them capturing her. Her and her friend Wilma, those initial post-war events, and having to think about how her world has changed again—the war is over. Then, when the British arrive, she meets a young officer that she connects with over books, and they wander around swapping books and talking. All this happens in about twenty pages. What follows is Jack’s letter when he is sent away, and how being sent to Israel upsets his worldview, leaving him feeling rootless. He was Jewish from Vienna but had moved to Britain. The return to Palestine hit him hard after the initial time in Naples, after he first left Vienna. The tone of his letters changes over time when writing back to Inge. I wish we had her letters so we could see what she wrote to him. He says that her vision of her world is beyond her years.

Now almost a month has passed and I still haven’t managed to pull myself together. I’ve had to fight my way through some pretty difficult times during my life but it seems to me that nothing in my previous experiences can compare with the last few days and weeks.

Completely uprooted, with nothing to hold on to, something I’ve never been through before, these last few weeks have been the most terrible time I’ve had to go through. Do forgive me, dear, kind Inge, for writing things like this, I’d love to have something happy to tell you but every line I add brings new pain and new suffering. I can’t describe my true situation to you, I feel as if I’ve sunk incredibly low, a disaster which I perhaps alone sense, for I alone experience it, experience it all on my own, as alone as I’ve never been before, I wasn’t even as devastated by the death of my mother as I have been by this last month.

Jack letter shows how he feels rootless due to his past

This is one of those odd little books that I love to find a little piece of a writer’s life, a glimpse into Ingeborg Bachmann before she became the outstanding figure in German literature. I haven’t read Malina, so I thought this would be a great intro to her. Although her actual written part of the book is twenty pages of diary entries. Jack is actually more of a character in this collection a man lost in the world because of the war and his own past. There is a feeling that the time with Ingeborg in Vienna is a small piece in his life and in his companionship with the young Inge, and that the time he spent with her and her family touched him. But then he is blown away by what he sees in Palestine, connects to it, and the memories of a summer romance are captured here. I love the book itself. Seagull does such nice books. I hope to get to Bachmann’s novel and other writing at some point. Have you read Bachmann or heard her radio plays ?

Blue Night by Simone Buchholz

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Blue Night by Simone Buchholz

German crime fiction

Original title – Blaue Nacht

Translator – Racvhel Ward

Source – Library books

I had planned be a little more active in German lit month but I’v had a few days of wanting to just sit and not do a lot. I had a stressful day last Thursday. Anyway, back to German lit month and Ton yna d Carolinbe this year. I hope Lizzie feels better soon and is back next year. Have been told to try Genre fiction this week. I usually just read anything german but I am trying to start with a Genre piece a Crime novel. I had read another Buchholz book last year and actually liked her character, Chastity Rileya, a cop based in Hamburg. I had thought this was the first book, but it isn’t. Anyway, this is set before the other book. But as with any crime book in a series, it should stand as a lone read; this does.

A kick in the right kidney brings you to your knees.

A kick in the belly, and you go down.

Kidneys again, left one this time, to really shut you up.

Then they whip the coshes out from under their jackets.

Three jackets, three coshes.

Left leg, right leg.

Left arm, right arm.

And six feet for twelve pairs of ribs.

Your very own many-headed demon.

Tailor-made to order.

Then out come the pliers.

Right index finger.

A clean crack.

But you’re left-handed; they don’t know everything.

One final kick to something broken.

Then they leave you lying there.

It took one minute, maybe two.

The opening lines the attack that lead to the unkown man

We find out at the start of the book that Riley has been transferred after maybe treading on someone’s toes —something she shouldn’t have done in the past —and that she is given a role in Witness protection. The book opens with a violent attack on a man who is left with many broken bones and a finger removed. This man is the one she is assigned to protect, but she is a restless soul and isn’t going to sit and babysit him. No, she decides to find out who this man is and basically what caused him to be beaten up so badly. This leads her into the drug world around the port of Hamburg and a kingpin that needs to be brought down. An Albanian who has control of the drugs moving in and out of the town. She, with the help of her colleagues and connections from her own murky past, makes their way to this man and brings him to Justice. Riley is a maverick who loves her colleagues like family, but is also a drinker and smoker who shows what toll this job has taken on her now and in the past.

I don’t know what to do with the telephone. It’s too loud.

It’s got to stop.

I thrash around with my hand, raising my arm as far as I can, and try to find the thing. There. Left of my bed. That takes so long, a thought filters through to me: throwing the phone at the wall would not be good.

Answering it would be good.

Cough, breathe, hack. I feel dizzy. Lying down.

‘Yes?” Oh God. My voice sounds like an old crow making a crash landing.

‘St Georg Hospital here, surgical ward. Good morning. Am I speaking to Ms Riley?

‘Yes, I think so?

‘He’s awake, says the hospital voice, sounding a bit offended. ‘You wanted us to call you immediately.?

‘I did, I say. ‘What time is it?

‘Half past five?

I see. No wonder I feel dizzy. I only went to bed three hours ago and not with particular aplomb. More of a stumble really. I think I can vaguely remember crashing into a door frame between the bathroom and bedroom. I feel my head. Right. There’s a bump. I open my eyes a crack; the full moon glitters right in my face. Not a cloud in the sky.

He awakes and RIley starts to uncover what has happen rahter than protection she is meant to do !

Of course, every detective needs a few things. A past, her past, is hinted at. Habit her the drinking and smoking sidekicks. But the main thing a significant detective needs is a place to be that detective. Here it is, Hamburg , but also modern Germany. This book, like the other, features criminals from further afield. A port town is always full of people who have come from other places. This isn’t the clean Oxford of Morse or the Historic Edinburgh of Rebus, although she is like him in the drinking stack, well, both of them. No, if there is a detective that springs to mind, it is a mix of Vera and Taggart. Hamburg and Glasgow are similar places: port cities, Hard cities, and with a long history. It is a short book, 280 odd pages, that can be read over two nights or, if you want a late-night, in a single sitting. It is nice to have a strong female as the lead character, and also one who isn’t as straightforward as they first seems. Have you read any of the books in this series? Which should I read next ?