Category: Austria

Library for the war wounded by Monika Helfer

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Library for the War Wounded by Monika Helfer

Austrian Fiction

Original title – Vati

Translator Gillian Davidson

Source – Library book

I brought this from the library for German lit month, read it, but didn’t review it, which I should have. I loved this book, it is by the Austrian writer Monika Helfer and is a piece of autofiction around her own father. The book itself was shortlisted for the German Book Prize, which is the German equivalent of the Booker Prize. What we get in this is a daughter piecing together the fragments of a father she never really knew. I love the English title, but wonder why Father is the Austrian title. .

We called her Mutti, not Mama. Our father wanted it that way. Because he thought it sounded modern.

Modern our mother was not. She came from the remotest backwoods, her brothers were a wild bunch.

When their parents died, the oldest, Uncle Heinrich, was just seventeen or eighteen. The children had to fend for themselves. No one helped them. They didn’t have faith in the Church nor in Hitler. Well, Aunt Irma did have faith in Hitler. For her, he was modern.

Uncle Lorenz said she shouldn’t put her hopes in him. She never had anyway, she said after the war.

Our father was convinced that people living in such circumstances were better somehow, deep down.

Like him. He also came from a sort of down-and-out family. He used to quote Rilke: ‘For poverty is a great glow from within?

Vati and Muti are names used for parents.

The book focuses on a character in the present trying to piece together her father’s life. Josef lived a man born in relative poverty and only learnt to read when the local gentry wanted to help him. When the Nazis take over, he is sent to the Eastern Front and loses his leg. From this point is where she remembers her father. He is given the job in the mountains at a home for the war-wounded. As they have a massive collection of books, this is where the title comes from. He loves to read books and has shown signs of developing from his love of reading. Still, when he start to make changes oiut how the recovery centre is run the bosses appear he rushes to bury the books these are all fragments she piece together of what Josef was like a man she never really know and in a way he is maybe a litle like Godot in a way as he isn’t front and centre in the book but more a ghost a person remembered.

I am tired. I close my laptop, stretch, it is only early afternoon. It is not the writing that makes me tired, nor is it the remembering. I want to be tired. I use tiredness as a professional tool. I need to get closer to the dreams, not quite asleep but no longer totally awake, remembering comes more easily this way, that’s my experience, I want to make use of this phenomenon. I am conjuring. What a lovely expres-sion! I conjure up the sound of our mother coming up the stairs, taking off her dress and giving her skin a scratch. I used to love hearing that, then I knew: now she’s putting on her fresh white nightshirt, which has been carefully pressed, and before she goes into the main bedroom, she’ll cuddle up with us girls for a quarter of an hour. Did we even know the phrase

‘cuddle up?

In the present as she looks into the past

I have chosen a short review for this book, it is one of those books that is great to read and lingers with you, this ghost of a man, a father, but one of those that always seems distant. I think this is common with mid century parents they worked kids where kids in their world, and the two rarely crossed, so Josef remained an enigma to the writer of the book his daughter as I say he is there but spoken about and not front stage in the book we what he does often vthrough others a patchwork of memories and those tales that drift dowwn through the years.If you are a fan of Robert Seethaler’s work, this is the same world of the Austrian Alps and family. I also see a bit of Ian McEwan in this book, Secrets in the Past. Have you read this or her other book?

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 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 ?

The Class Reunion by Franz Werfel

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The Class Reunion by Franz Werfel

Austrian fiction

Original title – Der Abituriententag

Translator Bernhard Rest

Source – Review copy

I was kindly sent this book by Eglantyne Books, a small publisher located in the same building as Istros Books. When I was asked if I wanted a copy of this early novella by the Austrian writer Franz Werfel, I said yes. I said yes as he is one of those writers who has been on my too-read list for a long time, in fact, going back to the early days of the blog when I interviewed Peter Stephan Jungk, who had written a biography of Werfel. I was lucky to find an old edition of Songs of Berndette a few years ago, and Penguin has also brought one of his books back into print in recent years. He was on the short list to win the novel prize in 1945, but he unfortunately had a heart attack and died two months before the prize was announced, so he was withdrawn from the list. He, in his time, was good friends with a lot of the outstanding writers of the late 20s and early 30s, Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Robert Musil and the critic Karl Krauxse was a fan of his at the time. The class reunion has been made into a film on a few occasions in both Germany and the Czech Republic. The story follows a weekend in the life of two men.

When Sebastian entered the private room in the Adria Cellar, most of the gentlemen who had resolved upon celebrating the reunion were already present.

A group photo was being passed around, in which an obtuse pyramid of a symmetrically arranged assemblage of youths could be seen. The caption claimed that these young people, who were crouching, sitting and standing in three layers, were the graduates of class Nineteen-Hundred-and-Two of the Imperial-Royal State Gymnasium of Saint Nicholas.

The passage of time had conferred something ridiculous on all the characters in this faded photograph. They either sprouted out of their clothes in long stalks, or they inhabited the outsized suits that housed them like certain cakes that had failed to rise. The most audacious headgear enlivened the rows: rustic hats, sports caps, mariners’ berets. One enterprising head even donned a stiff bowler hat. The indentations that had spoiled the smoothness of that hat in that forgotten hour, made by fingers some twenty-five years ago, could be seen to this day.

At his reunion

The two men at the heart of this book are Judge Ernst Sebastian in the town of Saint Nikolaus, but it is really a thinly veiled version of Prague. Nikolas is the patron saint of the city. He has had a man brought before him for killing several Prostitutes. The two men are left alone as Ernst tries to find out what has happened. But in that instance, he is struck. This man, Franz Adler, was a classmate of his at the private school they went to. The other man, Franz, is beaten down by his life, and it seems to have escaped notice that Earnst is his old school friend. So he cuts the meeting short to continue on Monday. But strangely enough, that weekend he is due to have a school reunion, he talks about Alder with his classmates, but as the evening goes on, we find out more about the Judge’s past. So when he returns on Monday, we will know more of his past, and is this the same Alder he knew?

Oh, how endless and how rich are our boyhood days!

During these endless and rich boyhood days I thought I had forgotten the grave insult that Adler had inflicted on me. That is to say, I no longer thought of it. But deep within my temper, the arrogant words kept on hammering away and grew into a hideous power that longed to be unleashed. This would happen unexpectedly. To this day, it is the same with me: I bear grudges without knowing it. Something that might have been festering in the gloom of my soul for perhaps years will erupt suddenly, surprising myself. And, if I were not a resentful man, would I carry a grudge against myself after all these years?

Weeks passed.

As I already mentioned, when we lined up in our sports lessons I used to stand next to Adler. Already in Vienna I had gained a reputation as a fairly decent gymnast. Here, at Saint Nicholas, which was full of intellectuals and bookworms, I was in a league of my own.

When talking about Adler at the reunion

This book has it all, really. Secrets both in the present and in the past. Identity is the people they seem to be. The memory, how reliable is it at times like this! I can see why it has been made into a film and a tv series in the past. It has a plot that twists here and there, a few things you didn’t expect, as we see behind the mask of those in the upper class and those who have fallen from that class as well. It is also about how we can forget the past until we have a sort of Madeleine moment, when the two men are first left alone, which has a knock-on effect. I was also reminded of an episode of the Tales of the Unexpected Galloping Foxley about a man who sees a man he keeps thinking is his old school Bully Foxley. There is also an air of last year in Marianbad to me, as real events are forgotten or changed in the past, if that makes sense. Anyway, it is a great book to see back in print from a writer who was huge in his day. Have you heard of Werfel or read him ?

 

Yellow Street by Veza Canetti

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Yellow Street by Veza Canetti

Austrian fiction

Original title  – Die gelbe Straße

Translator Ian Mitchell

Source – Personal copy

I have moved to Austria on my tour around the world for this year’s Women in Translation Month, and I am a writer whose husband was more famous than her. Veza Canetti is the wife of the Nobel winner Elias Canetti, a writer whose books I have loved. She had published the odd story here and there in her lifetime with pseudonyms as he stories were considered left-wing and satirical at the time. She had also translated Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys, a writer I want to read. I have that book by him on my TBR. What this collection of tales by her did was capture the street she grew up on in Vienna, a working-class Jewish street. In a way, this is a testament to a place that, shortly after she wrote the stories, was no longer there.In post-war Vienna, we head down the darker and less known side of the city in the thirties!

One day, as Runkel was being pushed across the street in her perambulator, she was overcome by such despair over her wretched life that she wanted nothing more than for a heavy lorry, a cattle truck, a thousand-kilo road-roller or a tram with three trailers to run over her horrible body and crush it. So she gave the maid Rosa, who for years had looked after her, nursed her, carried her from her pram into her flat, from the flat to the pram, quite meaningless signals, distracted, nervous signals, as to how she was to cross the street, she confused her with angry interjections to such an extent that there was indeed a collision, with a motor-cycle that came racing past.

Only, this motor-cycle mangled not Runkel but the serving-maid Rosa, for, at literally the last moment of her life, this loyal soul pushed the pram containing the cripple abruptly forward, shielded it with her own body and so brought about her own death. Runkel, however, lay on the ground, with both her arms broken, for the twelfth time in her life she had suffered broken limbs, usually it was her legs. which hung down short and lifeless like those of a jumping jack.

The opening story

The book is a collection of five stories that are all set around the people who live and work in Yellow Street, a jews street full of poverty, the working-class disabled and people down on their luck for various reasons. So we have the disabled Frau Runkel in a wheelchair with her arms broken, a broken woman, a vision of absolute despair, wishing for the end of her life, which has a tragic twist involving Rosa, a Maid. The Herr Vik, a tobacconist who has an almost autistic routine in his life, a feeling of OCD in his tale of a man drawn by routines. He is the last story; these two people bookend a series of stories of a poor Jewish neighbourhood in the 1930s in Vienna.

Herr Vik, his jaws working busily, hurries along Yellow Street, getting very agitated over the bales of leather being unloaded and the crowds of people that are in his way today; Herr Vik can no longer go out without his walking stick, so filthy has the street been made by dogs, and Herr Vik is busy shoving just such a yellow mess out of his path when up runs Hedi with a yellow book and a collecting-tin.

Hedi knows Herr Vik, because her mother does the cleaning for him. Herr Vik rushes past her, but Hedi is not going to be easily deterred. ‘Herr Vik! Herr VIk!’ she calls and holds out her little book to him. With a jolt, Herr VIk stops, takes the yellow book, reads it very carefully, gives it back to Hedi and rushes off again.

He hurries along, and the farther he runs, the greater becomes his annoyance, for more and more people get in his way; the whole street is mad today, they’re all mad today, but they won’t get anywhere with him, nobody’s going to deprive him of his freedom. And he forces his way through, laying about him, so that people move aside in alarm. Outside the Café Planet he comes to a halt, then bolts inside.

Herr Vik made an impression on me

This book captures the underbellyof Vienna we rarely see , I think these are the same characters many yer later Thomas Bernhard woukd write about in his book the cheap eater those just getting by or not getting by at all like the disable Frau Rinkel in the first story the cloud of wehat happens in the thirties althopugh never really mention seeps into the tales and the down oan out folks the flotsam and Jetsom of the city we never really seen in other books. She captures the streets she grew up on and also moved away from those she left behind, as shown in these five short stories. She has a compassionate look at these individuals, and one feels these were people she would have seen. I felt this especially with Herr Vik a man who then would seem odd with his quirks and routines, but now would be maybe seen as neurodivergent. I am pleased someone chose to publish her work as she would just have been known as his Elias’s wife and occasional translator, not a writer with a sharp eye for the human condition and capturing a world that is sadly gone now. Have you read her book or any of the husbands or wives of other writers?

The Waterfalls of Slunj by Heimito Von Doderer

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The Waterfalls of Slunj by Heimito Von Doderer

Austrian Fiction

Original title – Die Wasserfälle Von Slunj

Translators – Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser

Source – Personal copy

I’m back on with a classic, I will still be trying to read mainly classic this year. Oddly, today is the first day I have felt my usual bookish self this year. This year, I have struggled to read, blog, and use social media. So I was so happy I managed to sit earlier and read under pages in a coffee shop. Thought about the upcoming weeks. One of the books I struggled to get through this year was by Austrian writer Heimito Von Doderer. He was born into a privileged family at the time, one of the wealthiest families in Austria. I have two other books, the one that came out from NYRB a while ago and the genuinely epic two-volume The Demons, which was republished by an American publisher and has over 1000 pages. This book was meant to be a multi-volume series, but he only wrote this, and the second volume was published after he died. So we are thrown into The Tale, the end of the Austor Hungarian Empire. The book was meant to be seven books from 1880 – 1960, but only the first two were released.

However, all these rather grand houses, each standing alone at the edge of the grassy park, suffered from the same fundamental trouble. They were damp. Their basements were dank as dungeons. But just at this time, when the Claytons settled down here, a Vienna firm put on the market a drying-stove of a new design. The poster by means of which this new product was brought to the public notice was terrifying. It showed the new stove standing in the gloom of a cellar, its maw fiery; from the left and the right side of the stove there grew arms with fists uplifted; and from this monster panic-stricken toadstools and mildewy hobgoblins were fleeing, their faces contorted with mortal fear, while the wildly flickering rays of ferocious heat from the stove’s mouth pursued them in their headlong flight, decimating them. One could scarcely help feeling sorry for these doomed creatures, these little galloping fungus legs, wailing toadstools, and hurrying vapors. That poster of the stove with the threatening, whirling fists was to be seen in Vienna for many years. It was still there in the time of little Donald Clayton.

Grand House was a world the writer grew up in !

The book follows the Claytons and the English industrialist family trying to set up and move into the Austro-Hungarian with their new Office in Vienna. Along with this, the title of the book comes from the fact. Early in the book, Robert and Harriet, the parents of the two main characters, their sons Robert and Donald, spend the Honeymoon at the Hotel at the Falls, located in Croatia. This book sees the sons setting up the factory and the people working in the factory [particularly Chwostik, the deputy director of the Factory, who used to live with p[prostitutes. The factory makes agricultural machinery and, in some shadow,s actual companies working there at the time. It captures the later end of the 19th century as the world suddenly sped up. As we see how, all, this world is a lot of characters and, in a way, memories of the time. It all stems from the Claytons, the father and his sons.An epic book that also has a bit of humour at times and sees a world long gone and, as it was happening, was doomed, which I love to read.

At this point in developments a gingerly key was inserted into the lock (Münsterer always went about very quietly here, without himself knowing why; perhaps it was a sort of echo of his reverence for Chwostik that made him behave in this way).

He did of course also hear the voices that came from the room now his, for the door was open. At the same instant he realized, in retrospect, that the front door had opened when he had turned the key once; so it had only been shut, not locked. He could hear his stepmother talking. She had simply walked into his room with someone (new tenant?), and there she was talking; and he came slinking in like a dog. Now he could make out what she was saying: “… yes, that’s how it is, sir, it’s for my stepson, who lives with us, and us having no room for ourselves as it is. He wants to get married. In the post office, he is.”

But our poor Münsterer did not merely slink, he also kept his mouth shut. He was an underling of caretakerdom, the advance guard of caretakerdom, a pawn in Frau Wewerka’s sphere of influence (homo conciergificatus Wewercae

Chwostik the depty from the factory is anothher main character part from the Claytons

I think this is one of those books you drift in. It has a style that drifts like memories can drift. There is a feeling of Freud in the background of the book. It is one of those books in a notebook that is handy with the characters to keep track of them. But also, it is a world that is now gone. It uses both the personal world of the Claytons and the dying Empire like the river that follows over the fall clashing and mixing this is a book that was the start of what would have been a truly epic book I feel it captures the world before world war one. This book captures the historical and societal changes around the Claytons. Have you read any of his books?

The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard

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The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard

Austrian fiction

Original title – Das Kalkwerk

Translator – Sophie Wilkins

Source – Personal copy

When I first read the list of books for 1970, I thought I read this, but I didn’t want to get a secondhand copy as they were a little pricey. I then saw it is available as a Kindle book which I rarely use so it meant I got use it I do have a couple of Bernhard’s I haven’t read on my shelves as I still thinking of doing another Thomas Bernhard week. This was his third novel, and alongside a play he had staged that year, he won the Georg Buchner Prize in 1970. I feel this had some of the pieces from later books, most of which I have read by him. It focuses on the line works and opens with a woman dead shoot and her brains all over the floor of the Lime Works.

If only he could get his book written before he grew too old, absolutely too old and unfit to write it, he is supposed to have said to Fro and to Wieser. The minute he got to his room he went to bed. But the inner restlessness into which he was driven by the outward quiet would not let him sleep even when mortally ex-hausted, and so he wandered all over the lime works, several times all over the lime works, and spent the rest of the night lying on his bed quite unable to fall asleep. Once you have passed that boundary line between fatigue and exhaustion, it is absurd to believe that you can fall asleep, absurd to try to sleep, to force yourself to sleep; you weren’t going to fall asleep. In-stead, he got the opposite of the hoped-for re-laxation, the serenity he meant when he dreamed of finding a quiet place to work; instead of being able to relax, he only grew increasingly restless, so restless that he inevitably broke his own rest by doing something or other that brought unrest into it.

We know he never quite gets to finish his book

The lime work then works to how that happened, and we meet the husband, Konard a man who has spent several years working on his scientific opus, a book called The Sense of Hearing (Odd I thought of the Herzog film of that time, the land of silence which came out a year after this book ). We meet his wife, the woman killed at the start of the book, but this is a grim world of a man who does nothing. He has spent twenty years writing or not writing the book whilst living in the Lime Works he brought with the last of his money. Add to this the locals to the lime works, and we have a slow-moving, menacing account of a man descending into a hell that could be rather like a factory that was also a concentration camp. We know little other than the ins and outs of their life and never described much of what the pair of them are like other than the wife being wheelchair-bound. A nod to his medical issues, maybe the whole atmosphere feels like a world collapsing on the two of them.

it. People don’t instinctualize any longer, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, mankind no longer instinctualizes. Aha, so that’s the idyll the Konrad couple have moved into, they may think, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, but in reality the Konrad couple, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, moved into quite the opposite of an idyll when they moved into the lime works.

The return to an idyll, they think. Compared with the lime works, everything else is idyllic, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, London is an idyll compared with the lime works, Wuppertal is an idyll; the ugliest, the loudest, the most malodorous place is an idyll in comparison. But even the surroundings of the lime works have been deliberately falsified into an idyll. An intelligent person arriving in the area, of course, will realize at once that the place is no idyll,

I cut it ioff there as the last word the lime r=works was no idyil thou ot was meant be capture a loty of what i meant about the place as a character in the book

 

This has at its heart the character that would go on to a stock character for Bernhard in Konrad, a man full of bile and hatred. Here it is both at the way his life has gone. There is a sense of inertia in his life twenty years of writing a book that hasn’t moved on in the two decades he has tried to write it . Then, his wife echoes Bernhard’s own medical issues that, in the end, would see his life cut short. Then there is the place itself. The Lime Works is a grim-sounding place he has brought that, like the pair at the heart of the book, seems to draw out the worst of those around it, like the ghosts of those who had worked and maybe even died there are there dragging those in the present down weighting them down if that makes sense. This is a tense book of a couple falling apart a man losing his grip on the world. I still have Frost his debut to read, but this seems like a writer who has honed the Konrad character in his later books. This is like the Mark One Bernhard male character soon to be replaced by the Austrian-hating Mark Two of the later books her would write like The Correction and Woodcutters. A great fourth book for this week’s club1970! Have you read this or any books by Bernhard?

 

 

Without Waking Up by Carolina Schutti

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Without Waking Up by  Carolina Schutti

Austrian fiction

Original title –Einmal muss ich über weiches Gras gelaufen sein

Translator Deidre McMahon

Source – Review copy

I love it when new publishers reach out for me to review books in translation and it is great when they are outside the uk like Bullion Press the Irish-based press. Asked me to review this Austrian novel from the writer Carolina Schutti I said yes it had won the EU literature prize, a prize from which I have read a few books over the year. This book’s German title also grabbed me it is in English I must have walked on soft grass once. I love the enigmatic nature of that Schutti got a doctorate on b the work of Elias Canetti and has written a number of novels and poetry works. This is her first book to be translated into English.

There are various Babushkas. Some resemble each other down to the finest details and some have different pictures on their fronts. A different picture on every front and you know immediately which story belongs to it. And the big Babushka holds all the stories together like the cover of a book of fairy tales. You need to study the smallest picture especially carefully because if you are lucky, even this tiny surface has a background showing a forest or a stream or flowers. I was lucky. My Babushka was particularly beautiful. I can remember every picture and I still know the stories that went with the pictures; they translated themselves without me noticing.

Marek often asked me to tell him these stories. I thought that maybe they reminded him of the stories of his childhood, because they were similar, but perhaps he only wanted to prevent them fading from my memory.

The various woman through her life she had called that name.

The book focuses on a little girl Maja over a number of years we get fragments of her life. She is now living in Austria having come there from Belarus. Hence when the book opens she refers to a distant Austrian aunt by the Russian term Babushka. But that is also a hint at the book nature as it is about a woman that Maja had called through the years it is a doll-in-doll nature to the book as we go further in Maja’s life. this is a woman looking back at the fragmented memories of her youth a broken youth that maybe is reflected in her present her only childhood connection to a Polish man Marek and maybe in his life stories is that shared sense of loss of place that she feels and how her loss of identity when she lost her mother tongue. The past is a lost country is the opening line of the go-between another story of youth and jagged memories and the past is post definitely another country and life.

She can remember every bird and every stray thread of that tablecloth. But Marek’s face. The birthmark on his chin, the grey hair that was always a little too long on his neck, his dark incisor-tooth, the light-brown spots in his eyes, the face on the photograph she took out of the envelope. Fifty-fifty, the letters in white touch-up pen raised off the paper. Maja sees the face in the photo, she only ever sees that photograph face, as if she had never known any other.

I’m always amazed at what we remember in the past I remember photos of the past and they differ from my memory

 

I love books with fragment memories of how the mind plays with our thoughts of the past and it has always made for great literature from Proust biting into that Madelaine or the first line of L P Harley’s go between this is a book about Maja trying to piece those remembered fragments of the Babushka’s she had seen. I was reminded of last year at Marianbad where the idea of a past was now distorted and faded and forgotten that is the case her heritage is fragments of a lost connection to a Polish man her aunt didn’t like as I said the original title has a certain enigmatic nature to it and this novel does it is a series of memories stacked like the Russian dolls on the cover of the book but maybe like peeling the layer of an onion back the tears are here to be seen and the sorrow of that past but maybe also the ripples in Maja’s present life and situation/ This would be the sort of book you’d like if you have enjoyed the early books from Peirene press it would have sat with them well. I’ll end with another quote and this is one of my favourite Counting Crows songs but this book is like this too.”If dreams are like movies, the memories are films about ghosts.

Winston’s score – I am a sucker for fragments of a life in a novella so

this gets an +A from me

Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap

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Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap

Austrian fiction

Original title – Engel Des Vergessens

Translator – Tess Lewis

Source – Personal Copy

I start this Woman in Translation month off with a book from the Austrian writer Maja Haderlap. She was born into a family from a part of Austria where hr family where historically Slovenian and they were the only people to Stand up to Hitler in Austria this book is a family history of one such family living there and how this standing up to the nazis has effect the ethnic Slovenians that live there. It was a prize-winning book when it came out in German winning one of the biggest book prizes the Ingeborg Bachmann prize. Her own grandmother was in a concentration camp and her father was tortured by Nazis and was in the Partisans during the WAR. he hated the way even post war he and other ethnic Slovenians had been treated post-war.

GRANDMOTHER has her own understanding with nature She believes the fields and forests must be propitiated, not adorned with verses. A poem means nothing to nature, she says, we must always be humble before it. In the attic, she has gathered willow branches that she pulls from the palm bundles blessed in church every year on Palm Sunday. She makes small crosses from the willow branches, crosses we bring out to the fields in spring and stick in the ploughed earth to keep the potato fields fertile and the wheat plentiful. When a thunderstorm is brewing, she places pieces of willow on glowing embers and carries them through the house in a cast iron skillet. The bitter smoke is meant to clear the air and appease the atmospheric forces. You must carry your belief in God in your heart, Grandmother says, it’s not enough to put it on show in church. You can’t rely on the Church, according to her, the Church cannot be trusted.

I loved her grandmother she just jumped of the page

It is hard not to see this as part of this novel as auto fiction as the little girl the main narrator of the book who is growing up in post-war 60s and 70S Austria is about the age the writer would have been at the time. The grandmother and Mother are linked back to the dark day of the war years and the suffering these pheasant Slovene farmers had suffered for standing up and still do it shows how the shadow of the dark past is still there in everyday life . The way the Austrians talk around the ETHNIC Slovenians. But it is also a book about growing up on a farm and the connection a young girl can have to the creatures around her from a cow she loved that lost a calf to the horses. Her father is a man we see smoking but a man that has been broken by what happened to him in the war. The past and the inner conflicts that cause within the family the grandmother’s hours during the war Father’s sorrow and grief add to that a  mother who is often missing in the little girl’s eyes. This is a young girl; trying to make her way and seeing how her family had suffered and still are the way others talk about them as a group this is a picturesque forest and farming area but behind the natural beauty, there is some real evil still there.

When I arrive, Father is usually sitting at the end of the kitchen table with a bottle of beer in his hand. And presides near the stove on which she keeps her children’s dinner warm. As soon as I enter the kitchen, I start to examine her face and hands for scars. She was able to hide behind the stove, And says, but her little brother, who was in her arms, was shot.
On the front of the house is a marble plaque with the names of the children, the parents, and grandparents, engraved and gold-plated.
Father says he could never live in a house where he’d be reminded of the dead every day, several times a day, every time he went in or out.

I was so touched by her father and the ghost of the past here

This is one of those books that walk the line between Memoir and fiction yes it is easy to see them as her family but they are any family in those villages in the Carthinia region of Austria that were Ethnically Slovenian. This is also a universal story from the Marsh Arabs in Iraq to the Kosovian Albanians. I was reminded so much of a good friend I had working in a factory in Germany he was an Albanian from Kosovo who at the time was part of Serbias and like the girl they were classed as some sort of second-class citizens because of who they were and this is the same here the scar of the war is running deep in the locals and what they had done in standing up and the way they as a people are discussed is still the same as in the war the shadow of those acts are still there even twenty years after.I can see why this win a couple of prizes it shines a torch on a subject that few people other than those growing hip there and maybe those in Austria know about. The child narrator mixes growing up under this shadow but also the beauty of the land and the animals around them on the farm. Heidi mixed with a classic slice of war history. Have you read this book or any books on a similar theme ?

Brendel’s Fantasy by Günther Freitag

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Brendel’s Fantasy by Günther Freitag

Austin fiction

Original title – Brendels Fantasie

Translator – Eugene H. Hayworth

Source – Personal copy

After the last two books followed growing up in Germany. We are moving now to neighbouring Austria. And a book from Haus Publishing. A novel by the Austrian novelist Günther Freitag a writer who is also a teacher and has had a number of novels and plays published in German, and he has won a number of prizes over the years. A number of them over the years are around classical music like this one. Here we meet a man at the end of his life as he is dying and wants to see his final and grand ideas. The book follows his decision to move to Italy for a man dying.

CASTELNUOVO SITS ON two sprawling hills, whose slopes are planted with thick vines. Vineyards, a few craftsmen, several shops with food for daily needs, at the edge of the village a manor that has specialised in sheep farming. The ideal place for the Fantasy, Höller thinks on the way to Felsina farm.The rest home is situated on an elevated point from which the entire city can be viewed. In a display case in front of the community hall, a poster annoujncess a meeting of the delegates of the province abd the mayors from the surrounding areaa. A discussion of  enviromental devastation and sale of land to foreign investors.

Maybe this is why he struggles to get his idea off the ground to the local.

 

The book follows what happens when a successful businessman Höller is told that he has a terminal brain tumour. He is at the crossroads of what to do with the time left. Like many in his position, we see a man who has a family that has been pulled apart and affected by his job and work. His with high flying and sons that pay little heed to him now. He has one other passion in his life: Franz Schubert’s works, especially when they are conducted by the Great Alfred Brendal. So what follows is his decision to sell up and use all the money he has left to Go to the sleepy Tuscan village of Castelnuvo. There he decides he wants to put on his own piece of Schubert, the one he has always loved Wanderer fantasy using the locals, which are a bunch of unusual characters including the old man from theold people’s home, a drunken priest a dwarf that is the mayor’s right-hand man these all stand in his way. But he wants Brendel to perform it for him, so he writes a series of letters to grab the great pianist’s attention and bring him to this sleepy backwater. As events unfold, his mind becomes affected, and reality and hallucinations become hard to work out, which is when dreams and reality mingle. But will Höller finally get to see his dream of Franz Schubert done by Albert Brendel in this sleepy Italian village be he shuffles off this mortal coil !!

Back OUTSIDE, Höller imagines the dwarf as an usher. The black uniform with gold braid shall make the deformed man an authority who will not tolerate any rebellion and will squelch every insurrection with his squinting gaze, emphasised by an ominous, dancing Adam’s apple. But he will not be able to buy the uniform readymade.Höller walks to the piazza. More than four hours before the meeting begins. The political bigwig will already have made the journey, sitting in the back of a black Lancia and studying the press reports on the parliamentary sessions of the last week. How did the journalists react to his speech? Do they quote one of his colleagues for his remarks? Does the chairman of the party advance their position? Then he reads letters from his constituents, all written in clumsy sentences and always with the same requests. Can’t you drive any faster? As you command, Onorevole, whispers the pale driver.
The carabinieri drive past Höller in their blue Alfa at a walking speed. The passenger in the front seat looks at him briefly, then the car accelerates and races on toward the centre of town

As he imagines what will happen if it gets it off the ground

This is a dark comedy of the final roll of the dice of one man and the madness of it as he dreams of the great performance he is bringing. This is a smaller-scale version of the dreams of Herzog in Fitzcarraldo when he dreamed of bringing the Italian Opera Tenor Caruso to those in the Jungle. This is an equally bleak journey through the sleepy village and the hurdles they put in the way of his dream. The last effort of a dying man to escape and live in a dream, almost away from his present, will succeed. This is an unusual book mix of death and desire and hopes all in one book are hard to make work.

Winston’s score – B  interesting idea for a book

 

Wonderful, Wonderful Times by Elfriede Jelinek

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Wonderful, Wonderful Times by Elfriede Jelinek

Austrian fiction

Original title – Die Ausgesperrten

Translator – Michael Hulse

Source – Personal copy

I had read this for GermaN Lit Month but I just didn’t get to it in time. This is the second book I had read from the Austrian Nobel lit winner Elfriede Jelinek she is one of those Nobel winners that over time has fade that said I had partly read a non-fiction work the Fitzcarraldo had brought out earlier this year I will finish that at some point. When describing her win the Nobel committee said of her writing. “musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power. This is certainly a book that deals with the cliches of society. It first came out in 1980 and is of that time the period in the post war years it is set in the fifties.

ONE NIGHT AT the end of the fifties an assault is committed in the Vienna municipal park. The following persons all grab hold of one solitary man out walking.

Rainer Maria Witkowski and his twin sister Anna Witkowski, Sophie Pachhofen (formerly von Pachhofen), and Hans Sepp. Rainer Maria Witkowski was named after Rainer Maria Rilke. All of them are about eighteen, Hans Sepp is a year or so older than the others, though he too is without a trace of maturity. Of the two girls, Anna is the more ferocious, which can be seen in the fact that she pays most attention to the face of the subject. Particular courage is required if you are to scratch a man’s face while he is looking full in your own (though he cannot see much since it is dark) or indeed try to scratch his eyes out. For the eyes are the mirror of the soul and ought to remain unscathed if at all possible. Otherwise, people will suppose the soul is done for.

The opening lines open with them grabbing a man

The book happens to deal with the dark side of Austrian society at the time the undercurrents of the post war era. it is the late fifties when a group of four teens attack a man. The four teens are Rainer and Anne who are twins. Their father was in the SS during the war and is now disabled. Hans whose mother is a communist and Sophie an athletic girl(maybe a symbol in some way of Aryanism ?). The book shows the inner working of these teens. Who are just vile and very violent commit crimes? These angst teens are all that happened in Austria before they were born. Now they have been chewed up by the country they are in and have been spat out that they are the dark side of teens. This is a bleak work of teen violence ce lust sex and the past blended together and spat out on the page. Dark kids have a weird connection and love between them. The kids are maybe a symbol for the violence of the past they are like a champagne bottle shaken constantly after the war that undercurrent of the war, nazism, regrets, teen lust and hormones all shaken in the bottle to that single act.

The twins’ unhappiness makes them superior because they have shaken off the shackles and do what they want. Rainer says: people’s lives are predetermined in some way or other, but not mine, I’m superior to them on account of my Will. On the other hand, the individual is free if he wants to be. Rainer avails himself of that freedom, graciously: here he is, being awarded his accreditation certificate. There is a certain heroism in him. In this lonely youth. Lonely in the sense that no one sees him, which halves the value of even the prettiest heroism. Still, at least Rainer can look himself in the face when he’s alone with his mirror.

The twins are the heart off the book here you see the way they look at the world.

There is something about those writers of the post-war era of Austria Bernhard and her with Jelinek. They dived in and tore out the dark heart of the post-war and the past that lingered underneath th country and here it is kids of the rail this is like Holden Caulfield if he had grown up in Germany in love with his sister. This book is dark and complex I saw it describe as Molasses there is something about just the thick rich nature of her writing dark and vile in it tones but wonderfully written. I recently read High Wind in Jamaica another book about kids going off the rails as a group like here it shows how kids can be seen as violent for no reason. Then book like The dinner by Herman Kick another book about  kids and violence shows the after math of the act of violence this is a book that connect the two a sort of inner working of the kids caught in the violent acts they are doing. I wish it hadn’t been so long between reading Jelinek’s books she is a unique writer. Have you read any books by Jelinek ?

Winstons score – A the post war embers still burn in the kids of a SS officer.

Blue Jewellery by Katharina Winkler

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Blue Jewellery by Katharina Winkler

Austrian fiction

Original title – blauschmuck

Translator – Laura Wagner

Source – Personal copy

It is that time of year again when it is German Lit month and this is the first book I read this year it is. I choose one of the books from Seagull books. This one is by the  Austrian writer Katharina Winkler this was her debut novel and won a number of prizes when it came out and has been translated into a number of languages.I picked it as my first read as it is based on a true story but is also one of those stories that need to be repeated it is a universal subject of abuse no matter where it is the result is the same as in the book. She has since published another novel.

I have to cut the wedding cake, and after that they will lead me to the bedroom. I stare at the icing on the cake and the white rose made from marzipan, the music stops and finally Yunus is standing beside me, and Yunus’ mother, who is now my mother, places a knife in Yunus’ hand and my hand on top of Yunus’ hand, and together we cut ourselves towards my virgin. Dessert plates with cake and marzipan roses on them are drifting all across the room, hands that end in people are stuck to their underside. Men, women and children with laughing mouths, who take their parties as they come, and who don’t mind my virgin. A plate is pushed into my hands.

The start of Filiz Horrors begins not long after her wedding day

The book is based on the true story of a Kurdish woman and the inner life of her marriage. The two meet in their early teens Filiz is swayed by the beauty of Yunus. The pair marry against her family, but the sense is this can lead them to freedom from the small village in the Anatolia mountains and head to the west. The book sees the young Yunus see other women with what she calls Blue Jewellery is hidden away. The marriage soon takes a turn as FILIZ s sees the true nature of Yunus when he starts to abuse and attack he giving her her own Blue Jewellery this cycle continues as the pair dream of leaving but each time she is attacked she becomes more to his beatings and hiding the marks of it as they have children. Yunus becomes closed to the world of their home veiled and at the mercy of Yunus and her world shrinks around her.  They do eventually head to Austria via Istanbul with their young family Will fillip and her children Halil, Selin and Seda escape? what will happen? How far will the cycle of violence go?

When the girls from the Neighbourhood come and the giggles flow into the courtyard, I cannot remain a silent shadow. The giggles reach up  to my knee, and my heart beats.

I am a child , wife that I am

I join the giggles and hug the girls, and I laugh and show my open mouth.

Younus is beating me

He has to beat the child out of my bones

The girl put of my guts

He has to beat the wife into my bones

These lines so haunted me when I read them

What this captured so well is how often Abuse can be viewed as normal and how can a young girl’s life change so quickly at one point she said he beat the girl out of me and the wife into me struck me as so sad this is what she had as a marriage and accepted it. The start of the book almost made the abuse seem part of everyday life. I was reminded of some of the scenes in. Call the midwife this is a society caught out of time where the male role and role model have been skewed. The fact this is based on a real story is even more horrifying. As I said this is a universal story though it isn’t just a Kurdish story abuse happens everywhere and that is the important side of the story to highlight to make sure people know it’s wrong.The book has a sparse poetic nature to it. So if you like stories of village life a marriage doomed and a tough woman at the heart of it this should appeal to you as a reader if you like books like this.

Winston’s score – A – I wish I had read this last year a powerful insight into an abusive marriage

The Voice Imitator by Thomas Bernhard

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The Voice Imator by Thomas Bernhard

Austrian fiction

Original title – Der Stimmenimitator

Translator – Kennerth J Northcott

Source – personal copy

I am a little late start this week Bernhard week sorry anyway it is the second time I have done a week dedicated to the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I am a fan of his work he has a style I like his characters always seem to be at odds with the society they are in and he has a very caustic way of looking at the world around him till now all the books I have reviewed on the blog have been novels or novellas nine of his books I have reviewed I also have a piece from the last Bernhard week by the writer Andrej Nikolaidis he wrote for this blog about his love of the writer and his importance to his journey as a writer. So welcome to the third Bernhard week well let’s say fortnight this week and next week. Have you a favourite book by him? I now get on to his collection of microfiction

A man from Ausburg was comitted to the Ausburg lunatic assylum merely because, throughout his life he had claimed at every possible opportunity that Goethe’s last words were mehr nicht ( no more) tather than mehr licht (more light) , something that in the long run and as time went on, is said to have frayed the nerves of those with whom he came in contact that hey banded together to get this ausburger , so unhappily obsessed with his claimm comitted to a lunatic assylum. It is reported that six doctors refused to commit him to a lunatic asylum but that the seventh immediately arranged to have him committed. This doctor was, as I learned from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, decorated with the Goethe badge of the city of Frankfurt for his efforts.

The story the Claim about a man that refused to change his mind of Goethes last words!!

This is a collection of 104 stories or more snippets none is more than a single page most are just a few lines he has taken headlines tales he has heard and turned them into 104 stories there is a number of recurring themes in the stories such as Madness, bad luck, death and suicides these characters all have a little touch of what you expect from Bernhard he has touched on Madness in Wittigensteins Nephew which was set in an asylum which a number of these stories are one had a real tongue in cheek comic turn a man sent to asylum only after a number of doctors had refused to the last doctor said yes what was up with him as he refused to admit that his version of what were the last words of Goethe was no more (Mehr Nicht) as opposed to the given which is more light (Mere Licht). Then an orchestra plays and the audience claps encore after encore only to be told they had played to the Deaf school. The death of a woodcutter reminds me of the title of one of his other books. A man that was Tito’s double these tales he took from all over the place and range from comic to sad to profound to surreal.

A so- called Chamber Music asscociation famous for playing only ancient music on original tnstruments and for having only Rossini, frescobaldi, Vivaldi, and Pergolesi in its repertoire was playing in an old castle in the Atterseeand had its greatest success since it was founded. The applause continued intil the Chamber Music Association did not have a single encore left on its program to play. It was not until the next day that the Musicians were told that they had been playing in an institute for death mutes.

The story The most successful concert an orcestra plays a number of encores and then are told the truth.

 

I had wanted to try a few of the other things he had written so choose this for this year I will next year be doing either the poetry collections of his plays. This collection reminds me style-wise of things Kluge does in his writing where he uses snippets of this and that to build a whole and this is what happens here as the stories unfold themes grow like the books by Luis Sagasti his two books have underlying themes and his style of storytelling is very short like these. a writer that jumps to my mind a couple of times in some of the stories was Saki yes Saki there is a similar feel Saki had a great way of being quick caustic and comic at the same time something Bernhard pulls of so well here. It shows he must have worried about his own sanity at times it crops up a lot in these stories as people end up in what would be on a ward like the ward I work on but not for LD patients. As over the years I have read so many books by him you can see in his work he walks that fine line of depression and stress it is almost as thou for Bernhard his writing was an outlet he had very bad health for most of his life. I enjoyed these collections as it was more accessible than his novels and has a little bit of what is in all his books. Have you read this or any other of his plays or poetry?

Winstons score – A – as much as I loved this in some way it is dated in the terms used and also some of the stories are close to the bone these days but they were written in a different era and most of them are great still.

 

 

The Liquid land by Raphaela Edelbauer

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The Liquid Land by Raphaela Edelbauer

Austrian fiction

Original title – Das flüssige Land

Translator – Jen Calleja

Source – review copy

My second woman in translation month book takes me to Austria and a book that was on both the German and Austrian book prize lists make the German book prize shortlist in 2019. Raphaela Edlebauer studied philosophy and has published in numerous publications since 2009 and has had three books published two of them novels and this her first novel was written with a grant she got to write it. She grew up in Hinterbruhl which has a location near it that was the inspiration for the village of Gross-einland in the novel Liquid land a satellite camp, that was making plane parts in the second world war in an area surrounded by former mining sites. Which is similar to the village in the novel.

It was the fourth day of my journey in the Alpine foothills, and I sat down with the nearly split bread rolls in order to plan my trip for the day. As id this inconsqnential rhythm of stopping off at inns, contemplation, dinner, sleep and breakfast buffets were leading me to utter lethargy. I decided every morning  to uphold it. I hadn’t yet been able to let go of the hope of finding Greater Einland I loved simplicity of the conditions.

A village that has disappeared into the ether !

The book follows Ruth Schwarz as she has to deal with the death of her parents in a car crash. She is in the middle of her final thesis at university about the fluid nature of time and is struggling to finish this when the death arrives. This means she has to go back to her parent home village the lost vilage it seems of Greater Einland a village that her parents was form but seems to have diappeared in the time since they left eventually she arrives and start to dort out arrangments of her parents funeral. She is only thinking this may take her a few days but as she starts to speend time in the village she finds the village is caught out of time as the countess the head in a way of the village has tried to stop the effects of time on the village so it is a place oiut of time and also siting in the middle of lots of former mines as this is causing holes to appear around the area and the village seems to be oblivous to this and she evens finds that they already have the answer to why these things are happening with the details held with in the town Library ? What has happent ot make thew Countees act like this what has happen to the village and as time seems to stretch and days become weeks will Rith ever leave Greater Einland as those days she had intend to spend become weeks as she is drawn into find out why all this has happened.

It wasn’t until a few days after the strange encounter with the Countess that it occurred to me that I’d had missed my appointment for the funeral arrangements. I hurriedly called the company’s office from the reception and invented a tall tale about a psychological breakdown, The lady in the secretary’s office gave me a new appointment for the following day without complaint, and asked whether I happened to already know when my parents be transferred.

I said that I didn’t, and [romised to be in touch again soon, Too restless to work, I listened, lying on the floor back in my room, to a coulle of  Chet Baker albums I’d brought in a second hand shop, which fused with the autumn weather.

She meets the Countess and then time slips through her hands

The book has echos of things like the village in Whicker man an island but the way this village is hdden it could be a island itself also with a population that seems to oblivous to the outside world and the start of this is from the Countess that has something of the Miss Havishaim about her, in the way she has wanted time to stand still around here. Time is a large theme in this book a scientist that is sudying time, a village where time seems to move different to the world outside the village and the holes like black holes add ruth surname and the holes you have black holes and this is what is happening her a village caught in darkness as time is slowing down as it falls back but in Ruth’s eyes time is speeding past there. This has nods to a world of Kafkaesque twists and turns if Franz Kafka Dickens and Bernhard co written a book this would have been it a mix of great expectations , a kafka nightmare about to happen and a austrian sense to it all is an interesting mix I felt. Have you a favourite German language woman writer ?

Winstons score – A a new talent a clever tale of time and turniong a blind eye.