Category: germany

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

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The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

German fiction

Original Title – Lichtspiel

Translator – Ross Benjamin

Source – Personal Copy

There were a number of books on people’s guesses before the Booker International Longlist came out, and this is one I had seen on a number of longlist predictions.  Kehlmann had been on the Booker longlist and the old IFFP before that, and his books have been bestsellers in Germany over the years. So this was a book I had intended to read at some point. I know very little about the director at the heart of the story, other than he was the best-known German-language director in the Weimar Republic and had made films in the US just before World War II broke out.

The first compartment passes by, followed by a second. I suppose I have to step into the third, I’m frightened, it passes by too. Come on, I tell myself, you ve experienced worse. As the fourth compartment rises in front of me, I close my eyes and stagger forward. I make it in-side, but would have fallen down if he hadn’t held me by the shoulder.

It’s a good thing he reacted so quickly.

“Let go of me,” I say sharply.

Getting out is even harder, of course. But he sees it coming, places his hand on my back, and gives me a little push. I stagger out, he holds me steady again, thank God.

“Stop that!” I say.

It smells of plastic; from somewhere comes the hum of large machines. We walk down a corridor with signed photos of grinning people hanging to the left and right. A few of them I recognize: Paul Hörbiger, Maxi Böhm, Johanna Matz, and there’s Peter Alexander, who for some reason has scrawled With great thanks to my dear, dear audience under his signature.

from one of the opening chapters

The book follows the course of Pabst’s life, a man caught up in time. I think, for me, this is a perfect example of Javier Cercas’s Blind Spot.  The book is about Pabst and the Nazis, the blind spot being the truth of what really happened and why. It also has a turning point when his mother falls ill, just as the war in Europe is starting to spread, he is back in Austria and is caught having initially managed to get his family to the US in the early thirties, and now is faced with having to make films.  The book is told from the point of view of his fictional assistant as he struggles with making films and not being seen as a Nazis at the same time.  We see a man walking a tightrope in history; the German title Lichtspiel, light spiel, light game, is maybe more than an old word for cinema, but maybe for walking the line between light and dark. The book finishes after the war and discusses how he was viewed for making a number of films during the war.

She had kept him waiting for forty-five minutes not because she had been busy, but because she treated every visitor that way. The whole time she had stood by the window, watching the colorful birds as they stalked and strutted back and forth. The gardener had once listed the names of all the species for her, but her memory had never been good; usually while filming, someone stood next to the camera holding a card with her lines written in large letters. That was why she had developed a certain restlessly searching gaze, which appeared very mysterious on-screen.

He knew Garbo having cast her before fame

 

As I say, this book is about a blind spot, that place where we question what the truth is, what happened, and what happens when a parental illness leaves Pabst at a turning point in his life.  The man who lived with Louise Brooks and didn’t want to be like Leni Riefenstahl seems like a puppet of the Nazi regime. Art in the time of war is always hard to make, and this shows one man’s struggle to do so. We see a director as almost an actor in his own film of his life.  Our perspective is seeing how he reacts to all that faces him and how that will affect him after the war. I wish I had a better awareness of his films. He was a name I didn’t know a lot about. But I hope to maybe watch a few of his films over time, just to fill in some of the gaps around the man.  How do you make films and not be seen as a nazis wehen making films for the Nazis must have been a hard task, but what else could he have done? That is the question: what would have happened had he said no? Have you read this or any of his books?

 

 

The Nights are Quiet In Tehran by Shida Bazyar

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The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar

German fiction

Original title – Nacht ist es leise in Tehran

Translator – Ruth Martin

Source – personal copy

It was odd that there were two novels connected to Iran on the Booker longlist, and all this before the recent war had started there.  Life is often stranger than fiction. And the two books have different takes on the country: one from the perspective of women living in Modern Iran, and the other about what happens when you leave after the 1979 revolution and your family grows up in Exile in Germany. How do your kids deal with returning to Tehran? This book is inspired by her parents’ life in Exile in a small German town. It tackles the parents’ life in Iran firstly, then the life in exile, the daughter returning to Iran years later, and then the son’s perspective on events in Germany in 2009, each event happening a decade apart

The Revolution is a month old, and Dayeh is making stuffed vine leaves. They’re all sitting on the floor, my mother, my sisters, my cousins, my aunts. The wives of my older brothers.

They have laid the sofrehs out on the living-room floor and are sitting around them with bowls full of rice and minced meat, herbs, lentils, and they are folding vine leaves, one after another, and laying them in a pot and talking and laughing and talking and laughing.

There were just as many women when we were little, though they were different women. Our dayeh would send my sisters and me outside; we weren’t supposed to hear the women’s conversation, to interrupt the neighbourhood gossip. You mustn’t bother people while they’re cooking, we were told, or the food will take longer to make, and we went outside, where we played marbles or pretended to shoot down the murderer of the great and oh-so-honourable Imam Hossein.

After the inital coup the world slowly changes post Shah

The book opens in the last days of the Shah’s regime with the hope from the younger people living there, like Behzad a young communist hopeful, as the Shah falls this is a new dawn for the country, but at the opening section moves on the dream he had of a new Iran starts to fade and the religous voice start to run the country.  They are left questioning whether they can stay or go into Exile. So we jump forward, and the next chapter is from the point of view of his lovely wife, Nahid, struggling to settle into life in Germany, trying to be themselves in a new country, and wondering if things will change in Iran. Nahid misses the ebb and flow of the poems, the songs, and the way of life she has left.  This is a tale of the first generation of exiles, those who have come but remain tied to the homeland.  Then, ten years later, the baton passed to the daughter, Laleh (or maybe Shida, really), who goes with her mother to return to a window of relative peace in Tehran.  They head back; the mother finds a place where the ghosts of her past and present don’t match; and the daughter finds it hard to be a German-Iranian in Iran.  Seeing family that stated there are two further chapters, but this is a family tale set over the last forty years of being neither Iranian nor German and growing up a child of exiles.

Sometimes I imagine 1 am Ulla or Walter, seeing this Behzad for the first time after years of being surrounded by no one but Ullas and Walters. I try to hear him with ears that are used to different television, different radio, used to Helmut Kohls and Helmut Schmidts, ears that understand Nazi speeches, understand Goethe. But I can’t do it. I look at Behzad, stare at him, hear him talking, and try to defamiliarise his words, his whole self. Then I can’t help thinking of him ten years younger — ten years younger, badly shaved and with huge sideburns, thick black hair, and a deep, loud voice.

But then you can be caught between being Iranian and being German

As I said, the two books are so different. This book is made up of the voice of one family over the space of forty years and how the initial dream of the Post Shah years fell apart, and the regime became what it became, and people like Bhzad and Nahid had the choice to stay and change or leave and this shows the story from the perspective of leaving, but when they return, the world they left has gone, and the world they lkeft has m oved on. This is a tale of never fully fitting in place when you become an exile, the limbo of that life, but the effect on the kids’ lives being German Iranians with parents from Iran in modern Germany. It is a family story where the secrets of the past and the decisions one makes come back years later, and where a dream of a new Iran never happens. I think both the books about Iran are very different books, but also deal with firstly the post-Shah years, the change in the country after this, but also the view from inside the country for the five women in the other books, to the women in this book living and growing up outside Iran in the West!  Have you read this book?

 

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 ?

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 ?

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!

 

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 ?

 

The Ship by Hans Henny Jahnn

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The Ship by Hans Henny Jahnn

German fiction

Original title – Das Holzschiff

Translator – Catherine Hutter

Source – Personal copy

I discovered a while ago that several old Peter Owen books are now available as print-on-demand titles. Owen had a great back catalogue in a way they were fitzcarraldo before fitzcarraldo, they had some noble winners and writers that were just brilliant, as in this case, Hans Henny Jahnn has been on my radar, I thin,k since I was working one summer in a German factory with some university students and we played a guessing game of writers artist and such this name came up and for years I had want to read this book as my german wouldn’t be good enough ton get through all three volumes of this is part one wood ship of a river without banks from Henny. Henny was a writer who was best known =for his other job as an organ builder. He escaped Germany during both world wars, first in Norway, where he farmed. He also attempted to establish his own religion, being deeply drawn to the natural world and traditional religious ideas that were pre Christian in the way he looked at the world.

“The interior of a ship,” said the captain. “A mysterious sight for a novice.” But a few further thoughts came to him-that a hull was not a cathedral, but the walls of water all around it created a festive atmosphere to which only a hardened soul could be insensible. Just as the pit of a mine was a hollow amid rock, a ship was a hole in the water in which lungs could breathe. A human being had to fear mountains and water. A single piece of ashlar lying somewhere along the road bore witness, in its very immovability, to how much the flesh stood in need of protection, and how negligible was the weaponless hand. The beautiful law of the curve, reflected in the ribs of a ship, heightened the feeling of exaltation that emanated from the laden craft, from the being hemmed in by an element that was denser than air.

“People like to enliven the mysterious with their own fan-tasies.” The captain picked up the conversation where he had left off. “They imagine creatures like themselves, but invul-nerable, armed with a cloak that makes them invisible, with magic potions, and on ships they believe in ghosts. They hear their voices, they hear the noises of their secret activities, they have to be. And faith demands that there be a secret hiding place where they live.”

Hints at how the ship is more than it seems.

The ship is one of those books that is unique, quirky, and odd, yet in a way, nothing happens, but so much does. It is about a wooden ship with blood-red sails and the super cargo held in a box nailed to the ground. It is about Captain Waldermar Strunck, his daughter Ellena, and her lover, Gustav. Gustav has stowawayed on the boat. They are taken the mysterious cargo, the supercargo, somewhere. Still, the ship itself, as the voyage heads on, sort of becomes alive as they start to travel the shape of the inside to the ship moves and evoles it seems there is a sense of weird things happening a darkness around the ship and the crew, so much so that after a storm, a lot of crew disappear. All this is slowly unwound. This is a book about the strange, unknown, and how the mind plays tricks on you. This is the first part of a trilogy, and let’s hope someone will eventually revisit and complete all three books.

Suddenly the fog descended like rain. Cold squalls nestled in the sails. The ship listed to leeward, groaning. Waldemar Strunck came hurrying along the deck, out of breath. His command was unexpected. “Bring the ship around.” The sailors were roused from their duties. Their feet slapped on the deck planking. Everyone hurried to his station, singing. They tore at the block-and-tackle— an ordinary maneuver-but now it took place in a hurry. The captain’s mood had changed, noticeably. His brow was furrowed. And the commands of the man at the helm were tense. The second helmsman ran from aft to port and back again. A few minutes later quite a few of the men broke out in a sweat. All anybody knew was that the barometer had fallen threateningly fast.

Strange weather and things as they sail

Jahnnis one of those writers I wanted to read I have a minimal list of writer that have books that are either out of print or just very hard to get hold of to read. Jahnn was near the top of that list. I love the rabbit holes of literature, of going from A to B, and have a list of writers in old notebooks that I want to explore at a later date. To me, this book is like one of those films you watch where nothing much happens, but everything unfolds like a Bela Tarr film – a slow, unwinding narrative and a sense of dread about the world. I wonder if Krasnahorkai has read him. I can’t find anything online, but the ship has a similar eerie feel to the whale in his books. There is also a sense that maybe some loved puzzle boxes and the working of the organs he built, Jahnn, the way wood can sometimes be made to look whole, but then, with a push and twist, secrets are revealed. This book is like those small parts become bigger, and we discover things inside that weren’t there at first glance. This is one of those books that should be better known but is maybe too different to anything else to be that well known ? Have you read or heard of Hans Henny Jahnn ?

The City and The World by Gregor Hens

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The City and the World by Gregor Hens

German non-fiction

Original title – Die Stadt und der Erdkreis

Translator Jen Calleja

Source – Personal Copy

One of the first prose works from Fitzcarraldo, I fell in love with an earlier work by Gregor Hens, Nicotine. I had not long stopped smoking when the book came out ten years ago. Gregor had also been stopped a couple of years, and yes, ten years later, I am still stopped smoking, so when I saw this was coming out, I knew I would love it. Apart from that, he has also translated Will Self’s recent books into German. The book is one of those that is hard to pigeonhole. Still, the main thread of the book is our relationship with the city now, and also how we navigate the modern cityscape, in a way, revealing the similarities between many cities.

In January 1976, a year and a few months after Pere’s experiment, Peter Handke made his own observations in Paris; he carried out a far more spiritual kind of walk-ing, standing, sitting. His gaze is not that of a stationary camera mounted on the tripod of a café table, but that of the angel Damiel, who in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire is trying to get closer to people, the city dwellers, and not least the patrons of the reading room in which I am writing these lines, than his nature allows.

Handke sees the passers-by in the square ‘in a flickering winter atmosphere, notices a woman’s fake fur flying in the wind and notes: They are living before the catastrophe.’ Which one? What catastrophe has Paris been spared so far? What catastrophe are we (my mother, my brother, and I) facing? Handke was right, he had to be right, because we are all always living on the verge of catastrophe. One or another.

The mention of Wim Wenders and his film

Now, the book is a rambling look at his view of the city he has visited, but also about those writers, thinkers, and architects who have shaped those cities, both in the way they are laid out and within our minds. He takes us from Latin America and Buenos Aires and its connection to post war Nazi activities and then through China. Even flying cities and that writer on cities. Here, of course, he mentions Self, a great fan of psychogeography and people like Guy Debord, who, of course, coined the term and his map of the little islands of Paris. I loved the other parts, a mention of Berlin and Wim Wenders filming his masterpiece, The Wings of Desire ( I am such a fan of this film, I have watched it tens of times ). Another vague connection is a tale around the lead singer of Einsturzende Neubauten, Blixa Bargeld, which made me smile as I had recently just bought a couple of the band’s CDs. Another writer he mentions is Alexander Kluge, and his book Air Raid, which recounts the destruction of the small city where he grew up during World War II. I have reviewed this book.

Alexander Kluge recognizes that the air raid ordered by Harris on his hometown of Halberstadt in April 1945 is a hyperobject, an elusive, temporally and spatially diffuse entity. The dimensionality of the situation can only be represented in a literary montage that links the strategy from above with the strategy from below. In his book on the events, Kluge uses everything from eyewitness reports and interviews with pilots to maps and graphics, everything that could shed a light on the complex system of space and time, because the bombing does not begin with the air raid siren, with the development of weapons, nor does it end with residents scratching around for the remains of their relatives and friends in cellars that have become ovens in the firestorm because of the adjoining coal stores. If it ever ended at all, it was probably with Kluge’s final report written in 1970, which can, however, only ever be a temporary one.

I ;liked this last line of this piece about Kluge’s Air raid

It is fair to say I would love this book, it fits nicely next to the likes of Kluge, Sebald and Ester Kinsky, all of which are mentioned in the book at some point. It is one of those drifting books, a one-person quest to answer how we came to the cities we have. Also, if you’re a fan of Psychogeography and films like Robinson in space/ It is a book that I will return to over time it has so many little vignettes and titbits of information it needs to be read and read over time it is a book that will leave you wanting to look at a big city differently next time you visit. A perfect example of what the white Fitzcarraldo books are is thought pieces that make you, as a reader, think and question. A shadowplay of what a city is, as Ian Curtis said in his song Shadowplay, “to the centre of the city, where all roads are waiting for you ” they will be after you have read this book !!!

Spark of Life by Erich Maria Remarque

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Spark if Life by Erich Maria Remarque

German fiction

Original title – Der Funke Leben

Translator – James Stern

Source – Library book

I now reach the fifth and last book of this round of Simon’s and Karen’s year club. Last but not least is a powerful work from the German writer Erich Maria Remarque, He is best known for his book All Quiet on the Western Front, seen as one of the best books to capture the horror and utter madness of war. He fell victim to the Nazis when they came to power in Germany as they tried to smear his name and make out the events in All quiet fdidn’t happen and that he had fought in the war. Anyway, he left Germany and lived first in Switzerland and later in the US, where he became a citizen after Germany revoked his citizenship and banned his books. He in turn, changed the spelling of his surname from Remark to the French spelling Remarque. This book was dedicated to his sister, who had stayed in Germany and was killed for being a traitor by the Nazis Regime.

509 stared absent-mindedly at the wall. Silber, the Pole, while still lying in the barrack with bleeding intestines, had called it the Wailing Wall. He had also known most of the names by heart and in the beginning had even made bets as to which of them the spot of sun would reach first. Soon afterwards Silber had died; but on bright days the names had continued to wake to a ghostly life and then disappeared again into the dark. In summer when the sun stood higher others, scratched in lower down, became visible, and in winter the square moved higher up. But there were many more-Russian, Polish, Yiddish-which remained forever invisible because the light never reached them. The barrack had been put up so fast that the SS had not bothered to have the walls planed.

The inmates bothered even less, least of all about the inscriptions on the dark sections of the walls. These no one even attempted to decipher. Nobody was foolish enough to sacrifice a precious match simply to grow more desperate.

His fellow prisoners and how the ss came in

The book is set in the dying embers of World War II as the Allies and Russia are slowly putting a stranglehold on Germany. We join 509, he is a German political prisoner in a Concentration camp, they haven’t been lined up to be killed but just worked to the bone, he has been there for ten years. So when they get news that the war is coming to an end. There are snippets throughout the book, like the Bridge at Remagen, which had been taken, meaning they can cross into Germany. These men, the veterans of the time, started doing things that maybe a while ago would have got them killed, pushing the lines, hiding from fellow prisoners, as the feeling of the war got near, with the local towns now being regularly bombed. Can 5009 and his friends make it through the war? What will happen when the SS take over the running of the camp? There are some moment when they see one man talk about the washroom and how at another camp it had been a way to kill people and how when one soldier would come it measnmt one thing and then another soldier later on starts freeing some of his fellow prisoners this is the look at those german held in the death camps not killed but worked to they are virtually dead on the whole these are all educate menmiddle class souls broken by the camp

The roll call had already lasted more than an hour, but it still didn’t tally. It was due to the bombing. The labor gangs which worked in the copper foundry had suffered losses. One bomb had fallen into their division and a number of men had been killed and wounded. On top of this, after the first shock, the supervising SS-men had started firing on the prisoners who sought cover; they had feared they might escape. Thus a further half-dozen had perished.

After the bombing the prisoners had dragged out their dead from under the rubble and wreckage-or rather what was left of them. It was important for the roll call. Little as the life of a prisoner was valued and indifferent as the SS were to it, dead or alive the numbers at the roll call had to tally. Bureaucracy did not stop short at corpses.

This made me smile german effiency failing as madness starts to descend

I read All Quiet on the Western Front, and over the years, I’ve picked a few of his other books to read; they are still on my TBR. But when I looked up the books for this week, I saw what had happened to his sister and how it had led him to talk to some of the famous German survivors of these camps. He came up with 509, and this novel serves as a tribute to her. Unfortunately, when he published it in Germany, he initially removed the tribute to his sisters, as she was still viewed by many Germans as a traitor for what she had done. With recent events around the world, it may be worth reading this about what happens when a country turns against its own citizens with hate and lies! This is one of the reasons I love the club years is unearthign gems like this book. Have you read any of his other books besides All Quiet on the Western Front?

Mozart’s Journey to Prague by Eduard Mörike

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Mozart’s Journey to Prague by Eduard Mörike

German Literature

Original title – Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag

Translator –Leopold von Loewenstein-Wertheim

Source – Personal copy

I moved away from France in my year of Classics and went to Germany for a short, quirky novel written by Eduard Mörike, a Lutherananutherinan priest who studied in Tübinghen when he passed his Theology degree, he became a Vicart in a rural parish, but over time his writing took over he was considered one of the best lyrical poets of his time,. This book ends with one of his poems and Imagines a Day in the Life of the composer Mozart as he heads to Prague for the premiere of his Opera Don Giovanni. Happens to steal a bitter orange off a tree. This book has been made into film and A radio play in Germany over the years.

Most Gracious Lady,

Here I sit, a wretch in your paradise, like Adam after he had eaten the apple. The damage has been done and I cannot even blame Eve, who at this very moment is innocently sleeping in a four-poster at the inn, with Cupids and Graces hovering around. Command me, your Ladyship, I am at your disposal to answer for my extraordinary misdeed.

In sincere confusion, your Ladyship’s humble servant,

W.A. Mozart,

on his way to Prague.

He handed the note rather clumsily folded to the uneasily waiting servant and told him to deliver it to the Countess.

The letter he wrote after getting caught having the orange

We see Mozart heading with his wife, Constance, from Vienna to Prague. When they stop at a country estate mid-route, and Mozart sees an Orange on a bitter orange tree, he takes it but is seen by the estate Gardener. He then writes them a letter of apology (I love that there is still a time when the written word is needed to make peace with the local gentry, sow ehn the countess invites them for the night to stop with them Mozart and his wife to spend the evening with them. The count is celebrating his Niece Eugenie’s engagement. So, as the couple fit in, Mastero is asked to play them a piece from his forthcoming opera, which he is happy to do. But as this happens, Eugenie sees something troubling in Mastero’s future. Will his Art finally eat him up? This leaves Mozart questioning his life and how entwined his life and music are!

“I feel,” whispered Eugenie with shining eyes, while everyone expressed their approval of what they had just heard, “that we have seen a whole symphony in colour, a perfect example of the spirit of Mozart in its gayest guise. Don’t we see the whole charm and gracefulness of Figaro in this?”

Her fiancé was about to convey this remark to Mozart when the latter continued:

“Seventeen years have now gone by since I last saw Italy,” he said, “but who, having once seen it, especially Naples, would not think of it for the rest of his life – even if he had been no more than a child as I was. But never before has the memory of that beautiful evening in the Gulf of Naples returned to me so vividly as today in your garden. When I shut my eyes – brilliant, distinct and clear, without the thinnest veil to obscure it – the divine landscape lay before me: the sea, the coast, the mountains, the city, the colourful crowds lining the shore and then that strange fantastic ball game over the water.

His music sparks the family he is playing for

I will hold my hand up I am not a substantial Classical fan I have tried over the years and am aware of Mozart and his career in parts. So, for me, this was one of those books that I had to turn to and have a deep dive into his music and the opera and how it all fitted in on his timeline, especially with Eugenie’s talk of Mozart dying and his life. Mörike actually mixes the facts of the events up in his novella. But at the book’s heart is the connection between the  Mastero’s life and music. A life we were all reading was short, but he didn’t know this until the small glimpse from Eugenie into his future. This book can be read in the evening. It is what Peirene calls a film book and can be read in a couple of hours. If you like classical music, you will get more out of it than I would. I do have DSenis Forman’s Night at the Opera, a book that I picked up, so when I need context around a work of Opera, I can see what he said. This was at the time after his last opera wasn’t well received in Vienna; he was now Prague’s golden boy. Have you read this fun little novella?

The Sea in the Radio by Jürgen Becker

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The Sea in the Radio by Jürgen Becker

German fiction

Original title – Im Radio Das Meer

Translator = Alexander Booth

Source – Personal copy

Now I start with a far better review of this book by Joe at Roughghost. Not to put myself down, I don’t really know how to get into these experimental novels like this. I ordered this after seeing he had died earlier this month. The name was one I had seen on the list of writers connected with the post-war group of German Writer Gruppe 47, I have long been a fan of this loose collective of writers shaping post-war German writers. I, like many, feel this from reading Böll and Grass, which may be the two best-known names. When I read them, they were, and in recent years, I have read some others from the groups, especially Alexander Kluge, a writer I hold in the upper echelons of my personal pantheon of writers. Now, as for this, this is a collection of snippet sentences around a village. For me, it is like he has taken the world he sees down to the bare minimum. I saw this in Helmut Heißenbüttel’s work texts , which I reviewed a few years ago. He was another member of the group.

Where were you last night?

The small yellow plane is back, somewhat further away, somewhat higher.

At night you could hear trains. Nights you would always hear trains.

The first tractor out on the fields. Still. Then it begins to make large circles.

Now the bumblebee buzzes out the open door.

Glancing at the clock. One’s startled. Or one’s not.

The filling-station attendant says, You don’t see the fuel, but it’s there.

A bit slower getting up the stairs today.

We’ll have one more little one, but then we’ve got to get going.

When Charlie was still here, the neighbour says, Evenings I’d always be entertained. But she doesn’t want a new cat.

Preparations for a trip one doesn’t want to take at all.

The morning begins cloudless. At midday a few. Cloudless again in the evening.

An example of the style of writing

The novel is not really. It is maybe more like a redacted journal if you removed all personal details from it and dates and places, so what you have is like snippets one after another. If you took Under Milkwood and removed the characters and names from it there is, for me a connection to that. I find this is like a radio of images and thoughts going around the dial, I was reminded at times how, as A kid, I used to marvel in bed at night, slowly moving the dial on my short wave radio and moving over the stations from around the world. This is the effect here. We grasp just a bare thought, a tiny observation of nameless characters. What we have is the space in between these sentences. These aphorisms are ours to fill or not fill. That is the beauty. Like John Cage’s 4′ 33”, the silence is individual and just yours to saviour so it is heard with the gaps in. The sentence’s voids to fall in or steeping stones sometimes when the thoughts suddenly loop back to an early idea.

At night the man would sleep in his tent, hidden in the woods; during the day he’d go eat soup and pick up his mail.

Before flying off, the woodpecker lets himself drop.

It is hot and damp, and out in the garden there are snails.

The day hasn’t ended yet, and you don’t know what’s still to come.

Flags hanging from the windows. That hasn’t happened in a long time, and he almost got scared. Not all windows have flags. But some of them do.

The filling-station attendant says, Air doesn’t cost a thing, air is priceless.

Cloudless the night. You should be able to see the stars. If you can’t see any stars, the night isn’t cloudless.

The boy had come along to the station and waved after the train. He didn’t realize how soon he would be sitting on the same train himself.

It’s the same house, but the people living there today don’t know it.

After that, he began to count the days. At some point, it became too much, so he began to count the months instead.years

Another snippet from the book

So you get the idea. If you want a better idea, look to Joe. This is through my limited prism of the world and my limited knowledge of the language. But in a slight nod to Joe. The other piece of media, well, two, but the first links to Joe and the fact they live in Canada, I love the Guy Maddin film My Winnipeg: A Glimpse of his Childhood in That City, but the film was made up of little snippets like this another film directors work I felt connected to this was  Jonas Mekas the avant grade filmmaker his films flash from place to place and through time in a way maybe its all the effect of the world war on these figures. I can see Kluge in this as well it is the way the war is always a prism for the events and way a writer filmmaker looks at the world. An experimental poetic collection of journal sentences that left me wanting more from this writer. I think this may be his only book in English so far. Another book for German lit month. Before anyone says I admire Joe, and yes, his reviews are a million times better than mine, I aim to hit his hits one day, but I now find myself in my own orbit of reviewing books.

Twenty two days or Half a lifetime by Franz Fühmann

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Twenty two day or Half a lifetime by Franz Fühmann

German Fiction

Original title -Zweiundzwanzig Tage oder Die Hälfte des Lebens

Translator – Lelia Vennewitz

Source – Personal copy

For my second book for German Lit Month, I moved off the Guide Crime novel and picked a book I had decided on earlier this year. Joe at Rough Ghost had put up a picture on social media of a book by Fühmann, but I’m not sure if it was this one or another. U had read The jew car by him a couple of years ago and hadn’t known he had some other books coming out years earlier, so I found a cheap copy of this book which is on a subject that he talked and wrote about a lot in his later life, and that is Germany’s past he hAD BEEN IN THE nazi party during the wart but lived in East Germany after the war and was a staunch socialist. This book, written later in his writing life, is part memoir, part travelogue. It follows a three-year period he spent in Budapest in 1972.

October I9

Budapest: perhaps even more mini-skirts than in Berlin, in any case shorter ones, sometimes ending above the top of the stocking, usually cheap materials with an inverted pleat back and front and the skimpiest ones covering the ungainliest thighs

The intersection outside the Astoria is a No Stopping zone, a taxi stops, the customer has trouble with his money, the driver explains, the customer searches, cars block the inter-section, the cars blow their horns, the cars make a racket, the customer negotiates, the driver shows the figure on his fingers, the cars are now jammed up beyond the intersec-tion, the customer doesn’t understand, the cars roar, the driver of the car behind the taxi jumps out, cursing as he thumps the rear end of the taxi, the driver waves him off, the curser flings up his arms, and the cars way at the back reverse or turn and look for another route.

I liked this observation about skirts very of its time !

Fühmann finds himself in Budapest as a 50-year-old on a trip to a writer’s conference.(I’m always amazed how much more in  Eastern European states’ Literature is taken)  We see him talking with his fellow writers and his own poetic piece a few times in the book as he wanders around Budapest, talking about the city but also looking back at his own past and those war and post-war years. As the ghost of the Warsaw apcts invasion of Budapest some fouyr years before this book a book that start like a travelogue about the place thew writers become a darker book a writer thinking about his writing and also the past isn ever good as he wanders dark street drinks with his fellow writers. Talking about their works and place, it is a world caught in Amber.

Among pillars, in niches, under arcades: four pools, three large, one smaller, one shell-shaped, one shaped like a stadium, the water rising in temperature from the smallest to the largest pool each time by four degrees, from twenty-eight to forty degrees Centigrade, and on the water in the circle of the talking heads, bibs floating like lotus blossoms

Thirteen Leopold Blooms: what a metamorphosis

In the sauna: the old men have left, and now above the common people an athlete sits on the arm of a chair, wringing himself out. Doggedly, as stubbornly solemn as an athlete who has come in eleventh at the regional champion-ship, he squeezes the water out of his tissues, pore by pore, and every time he lifts his elbow he ripples the muscles of his arm, and no one pays any attention, wise nation! For fifteen minutes he works the section between collarbone and the top of his left breast, I might have been curious to see whether he kept up this pace, but the heat drives me out

Had pick this bit with its nod to Joyce

This is one of those lost gems that maybe would be great reissued a man wandering post-68 Budapest, a writer remembering his past draft into war by the Nazis and then those post-war socialist years, a time when the world he knew seemed perfect. But as he wanders around Budapest, you can see how that changes, and he talks to other writers. This has a bit of everything in his poetry, fiction, travelogue, and memoir. In the days when reading of a place was how to feel it before the age of celeb travels, he makes us feel the town, the Acacia trees, and the writers he meets. The city itself wound but still getting by. I hope it gets a new publication. My book is over thirty years old. I know Seagull Books has brought a few of his other books out. Described as one of the most sensitive books in East Germany. It captures those two extreme views of German life from the mid-thirties to when the book was written in 1972. Have you a favourite East german writer ?

Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz

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Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz

German crime fiction

Original title – Hotel Cartagena

Translator Rachel ward

Source – Personal copy

I had read this last year when it was shortlisted for the translated crime prizes, but. I never got around to reviewing it. So when the first week of this year, GHerman lit month is m, meant to be a crime, I rarely follow Lizzy and Caroline’s prompts, but I will join in for once. This is part of a series of novels about a Prosecutor in Hamburg. But the novels seem to all be able to be read as stand-alone other than maybe knowing some of the characters a little more than if this is the book you start with, it works as a stand-alone read. We find out when the Prosecutor, Chastity Riley, the star of the series of books, is caught up when twenty heavily armed men storm into the hotel bar where she is at a birthday party.

He looked at the water and watched the ships leaving, the warm wind tickled the back of his neck, he had his hands in his trouser pockets, he was hungry. He still had a little change on him, but it wasn’t even enough for a fish roll.

He had spent all his money on the girl.

Elisabeth or whatever her name was.

Hed met her in the Markthalle, at the Black Flag concert he’d been looking forward to for weeks. When she’d given him a kind of sideways smile, he’d had a few seconds when he didn’t know who he had a bigger crush on, Henry Rollins or her. Then they danced, she was wild and laughed, and that flooded his bloodstream with happiness; after the concert, with all the loud music in his bones, he invited her back to St Pauli; she was kind of scared to come at first, but he talked her three friends round and they all went off to the Kiez to-gether.

The book takes us back to 84 had pick this as i love Henry Rollins

The hotel is owned by Konrad Hoogsmart, and it is him the heavily armed men have come to deal with as they have been sent by people he has in the past destroyed their lives. This is a book that has a clever style as each chapter is a little story in itself as we move through time and place to piece together the slow picture of the event that led to the hostage-taking over the years and around the world from the eighties when a young man now one of the hostages take left Hamburg to head to Columbia and then is now back seeking Hoogsmart whose hotel is named the Cartagena where the events of years ago had these two men following different paths that lead to the evening and the party that Chastity and her friends find themselves in as views but also hostages what will happen to them all what brought this all about ?

They ate dinner together in one of the expensive restaurants in the old town. Henning, José and this man, whose name was Esteban. He was a good head and shoulders taller than all the other Colombians Henning knew, those little men with hearty laughter in their faces. Esteban didn’t actually look like a Colombian at all, more like someone from Madrid. He looked like a torero. Long and slim and knife-sharp. His hands were something like a fan of scissors.

But he was very polite.

He wanted to know how Henning liked it in Cartagena, why hed left his home, what he liked to do in his spare time. And he was very interested in Hamburg and in the people there.

Lots of artists?

Musicians?

Jet set?

People with money?

Years later in Colubia the seeds of the hostage taking are sown.

I loved her style of writing. It is great for a backstory, which, in a way, is the central part of the book. The events that lead to the present are often missed in Crime fiction. In a way, this could have been an even bigger book than it was. It has a clever mix of humour, darkness, and menace. It also captures how one man’s life led him to be the hostage taker and take a face to the faceless. I think this is something modern crime is doing well I know a couple of recent tv series have taken the thieves as the main characters, I think the Sopranos and The wire were forerunners of this as the made the criminals as well as the detectives both as characters and there lives are shared. This is what we have here in the book: the past of the Hostage taker’s life from Hamburg through Columbia, then hiding in Curacao to the return, and the present, about Chastity and the other hostages at the birthday party. I think Rachel has captured this book so well in its tone in English. It is an exciting book by a writer, along with many other books in the series.  Have you read any books from Simone Buchholz or Orenda ?

 

 

 

The Fire by Daniela Krien

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The Fire by Daniela Krien

German fiction

Orignal title – Der Brand

Translator – Jamie Bulloch

Source – Library book

Do you have any must-read writers? These are ones you have read before and loved, and you must get to their next book when it comes out. Daniela Krien is one of those writers. This is her third book to be translated into English. I have reviewed and loved the other two. She is very good at relationships and personal interplay. She has been a full-time writer since 2010 and has four books out. Her latest has not long been published in Germany. There is an interview with her and her translator, Jamie Bulloch. Where Daniela talks about how she came up with the idea behind the book but needed a way into writing the book, and when her own holiday cottage burnt down, it gave her a way to talk about the couple in the book and how their marriage is at the point of the book this is a couple dealing with the past a couple with as they say an empty nest,

They would have been leaving in three days. They’ll never be able to find something similar at such short notice, not this yeat, not in the circumstances. Without much expectation she enters her requests on a holiday apartment website.

No matches. She tries again on another site – with the same result.

Rahel goes to the website with the Alpine cabin. She clicks from picture to picture, from the geraniums in the window boxes to the small veranda with a view of the mountain range opposite, and back to the house, this time from a different angle. Then the stone basin by the well and the colourful wildflower meadow, and all of a sudden she can picture the blazing fire on the mountain. She sees animals fleeing, a column of smoke rising into a night sky studded with stars, and in the middle of it all Peter and herself, as if on a funeral pyre

The cottage is gone whwere now for them, the farm.

So when their Alpine cottage is burnt down in a fire at the last minute before they are due to go away. Rahel and Peter have to find another destination and go to a farm where, as a kid, Rahel spent many summers. She is a psychotherapist, and Peter, a professor, is one of those men struggling to cope with the modern world. This is a marriage that requires TLC. Grown daughters cause them problems when they visit them. Then, something Peter has said in his job has made him be seen as a transphobic. He is a man caught in the past. This is about when you lose touch with the youth, your wife, and your kids. It is a book about a man who is lost in time and in the West as they are both children of the East. This is the book’s point: what happens when your values are outdated and your children are Western? Your job is now Western.

He chose Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. At a castle people are celebrating a wedding that ends in a drama, while an errant planet passes threateningly close to the earth. When it speeds on its way, the danger seems to have been dispelled, but then it turns, heading straight for the earth. The collision cannot be prevented, and only the depressive Justine – the bride – is serene about the impending end of the world. The film concludes with the planet Melancholia hitting the earth, destroying it. Peter kept staring at the screen for minutes afterwards. The credits were finished by the time he snapped out of his torpor.

Peter reaction to this is maybe more than it seems mabye his world is being destroyed!!

I love subtle books. This is one of those books about a couple at that age when the world has changed just enough to make you seem out of time, even more so when you grow up in the old East German, and the world you live in now is like Wtrst germany values attitudes have changed. Peter is a typical male of his age if he was here he’d be a fan of Rowling and Farage I could see buying a daily mail and moaning about the world he lives in. Yes, this is a universal story of empty nest cou,le but what happens when the gap is between you and, like Rahel, she wants to light the spark, but Peter is maybe too far gone to get a spark from. This would make a great film. The tension between the couple would be perfect. The marriage in Children’s Act Falling Apart is a perfect example of two great actors. This is a tremendous two-handed film. A younger version of on golden pond in a way a couple trying to escape and find a new path as memories and the future collide. Can you think of any other books dealing with Empty nests and a marriage falling apart and how some men are just stuck in the past.

Winston’s score: A 3 down from Krien. I can’t wait for book number four. She is a must-read writer for me.