Category: germany

What Darkness was by Inka Parei

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What Darkness was by Inka Parei

German fiction

Original title – Was Dunkelhiet war

Translator – Katy Derbyshire

Source – personal copy\

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elly by Maike Wetzel

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Elly by Maike Wetzel

German fiction

Original title –  Elly

Translator – Lyn Marven

Source – Library

I saw this at the library on a recent visit and thought it was the perfect size for an evening read I still love the idea of a book being like a movie you can sit and read in a couple of hours. It was on a list of the best books in translation to read from the Guardian. It was also on the list for the Dagger Prize for books in Translation. Maike Wetzel studied in the UK and is also a screenwriter and novelist. She also had a short story collection translated into English. This novella caught my eye as it seems like it may have a twist around a child going missing and the outcome of this on the family.

The doctor hooks me up to the drip and puts me on the list for an operation. He wants to remove my appendix. My mother says again: Your colleague already took it out. The doctor prods my rigid belly. My mother stops fighting. She gives my name, our health insurance details. She called me Almut because of the north.

Because of the stiff breeze on the island of Sylt, where she has never been; because of the tall blond boy that she never kissed, because she doesn’t like tall blonds; because of the seagulls, whose cries make her melan-choly; and because of the seaweed and the salt which no longer cling to her legs: now it’s dark stretchy jeans with all their poisonous dyes instead. I’m also called Almut because it contains the German for courage, Mut, and my mother believed the name would give me

I just picked this as I had my appendix out as a kid

The book follows the effect on the family when the 11-year-old daughter, Elly, disappears. She was cycling home from a judo class. This follows when the daughter disappears. The family is gripped by grief and follows the police investigation. We see how Judith and Hamid Elly’s parents cope with this and how her older sister Ines struggles with the loss of her younger sister. So, after four long years, hope appears lost,, as time goes on, the hope of finding her alive drifts, and the hole that is left is still there, but the family, including her sister, move on with their lives. But then, after four years, Elly reappears, and the family is back whole again. However, as the family starts to heal, there are doubts about this girl who has returned as their daughter. Ines questions her about things they did as kids. Her grandmother has even bigger doubts. How has she come back? Is she Elly or ?

 

My sister disappears on a slightly overcast afternoon in June. I imagine how it happens. I see Elly wheeling her bike out of the garage. Her outline is clear and sharp, the background out of focus. She fixes her sports bag to the luggage rack. In it is her judo suit with the green belt. My sister is younger than me. I am thirteen at the time, she is just eleven. We live in a small town. Elly’s club meets in a sports hall in the nearest big town. She cycles there on her own across the fields. The wind sweeps through the wheat. From above, it looks like waves on water. Elly stands on the motorway bridge and looks down at the field. The wind ruffles her dark, almost black hair.

Ines talking About her sister disappering

This book is a wonderful mix of literary fiction and thriller in the way it is paced. The action slowly unwinds in the history of Elly disappearing, and its effect is told from all the family points of view, but the action turns around when the girl returns who is meant to be Elly. The book is an up-and-down ride. I was reminded of the early Peirene books that had the same quality as they did, and that is cinematic books that, like this book, take you as a reader on a journey. You can see that Maike is a screenwriter. This has the feel of a book that could easily be made into a film. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this being made into a film at some point I hope it does so I could watch it. It has a turning point of Elly returning and the doubts about her make this turn from a sad story of a lost daughter to something else. Do you have a favourite evening book, one you read in an evening like watching a great film? Do you like literary novels that have a feel of a thriller in the pace you can read them at?

Winstons score- A

A book strike me as perfect to be made into a film

Star 111 by Lutz Seiler

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Star 111 by Lutz Seiler

German fiction

Original title -Stern 111

Translator – Tess lewis

Source – Library copy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyone who utters a consoling word is a tratior by Alexander Kluge

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Anyone who utters a consoling word is a traitor by Alexander Kluger

German fiction

Original title –Wer ein Wort des Trostes spricht, ist ein Verräter

Translator Alta L Price

Source – Personal copy

As you may know, I am a massive fan of Kluge’s written works. He is a writer, filmmaker, and maybe the greatest secret of German writing. I still find it problematic that someone so similar in style to Sebald in his writing has not been better known in English. His works on the whole deal with the war and tend to look at it in great detail and try to take apart what happened, and here is the same it uses the post-war trials in Germany after the war of SS officers and those involved in the holocaust. It is a tribute to the German Jewish Judge Fritz Bauer, the man who tried Eichmann.

A wise man from Salamanca-doctor, theologian, jurist and forebear of Fray Luis de Léon–was a visionary. He could wind his way along the paths of the INTELLIGIBLE WORLD, parallel to the mere world of factual reality, to navigate the tunnels of the future. He never told a soul exactly how he did it. In the period prior to the 1492 edict of expulsion, it became glaring that Saint Dominic’s zealous followers posed the threat of persecution.

This sage advised several of Salamanca’s Sephardic families to emigrate to Lisbon before the forced expulsion. But they shouldn’t trust the Catholic rulers of Portugal for long, either; rather, he advised they continue their journey before 1497, moving on to the more tolerant Ottoman Empire or the Netherlands.

The Spanish Jews trying to escape

As always, his stories are like a whole view. He has mentioned he likes the Buchner quote I’ve always wanted to see what my head looks like from above.” That is how the book is made it events from France around Proust and certain French generals. I appreciate how the train line is so well built in Poland. He mixes little tales and history so well together. Tales like the expulsion of the Jews from Salmanca moved first to Catholic Lisbon, but then they headed north to Holland and Amsterdam. How the sheer number of forced labourers in 1942 had overwhelmed the Reich, and plans were in place if they reached India. Later on we see another mention of those Jews from Salamanca about Spaniards in the Fatherland. He has to lead Jewish history and life from 1492 to 1942 at times and the massacre of these Jews. We also witnessed Mass shootings at the camp, and then the post-war era led to the trials overseen by Bauer.

In the summer of 1942, the number of forced labourers from the Eastern territories in the German Reich reached its peak.

The units carrying out raids and organizing the transports were already overwhelmed. By the beginning of 1943, companies had begun rejecting many of the labourers being sent to the Reich because underage, incapacitated and sick people were being included, so they were loaded right back onto return transports to the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. The condition of those shipped back home (often to the wrong place) appalled the local population–this was yet another organizational error that made itself felt anew every time another load of people was picked up. These errors were brought up at the Central Conference of Reich Labour Commandos, and it was proposed they be prevented by better staff training going forward. In the meantime, the VALUE OF THE LABOUR FORCE, which the Reich had easy access to in the previous year but was now increasingly difficult to obtain, was recognized in principle by Reich leaders.

The sheer number and loss of those made to do forced Labour

The book title is a partial quote from the motto of the art theorist and avant-garde artist Bazon Brock and suits the work Kluhge has made the war his own in his writing he is a fan of the writer and theorist Adorno. He has the talent to mix fact and fiction, walk the line of truth and justice, and the dark times in his own country and shine a light on what happened during those years. I am still not sure why he is not better known in English, maybe because he is on a smaller publisher, his books are online and easy to get hold of. He has said in speeches he likes to tread the line of fact and fiction.  Theory and practice, he also used the full quote from the title of the book. The poet can’t do that, but he can certainly tell about it – constellation, documentary and the authenticity of the original experience. No consolation stories. Whoever speaks a word of consolation is a traitor. He is the voice of the Germans’ soul and regret of those times. So this is the 6th book from Kluge I have reviewed. I have two more on my shelves. Have you read this book?

Winstons score – A 48 stunning stories

The Opppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger

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THE Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger

German fiction

Original title Die Geschwister Oppermann

Translator – James Cleugh

Source – Personal copy

 

Now, when I saw it was German lit month coming up I hadn’t seen or brought much German lit tjhe last couple of years. I have a lot on my shelves to read. But a trip to Matlock and I have an eye for Persephone books I can spot them on a shelf that grey cover just makes them jump out, and I had missed they had republished this book.  I had recently seem my American friends posting the Mcnally edition of this book online. I saw this in the Oxfam in Matlock and thought this be a perfect choice for German lit month. As Feutchwanger was a fierce critic of the rise of Nazis in his homeland, he was Jewish and a good friend and inspiration for his fellow writer Bertolt Brecht. They had written against the rise of Hitler together in the book. His house had been raided and stripped of things by Nazis agents. he managed to escape to the US. This book is the middle book of a trilogy but it stands alone as a novel that follows the years up to 1933 of a Jewish family in Berlin as the world closes in around them.

On the wall above his desk hung, as in all the Oppermann business offices, the portrait of old Immanuel. He felt a slight pang at the thought that it was no longer the original, but a copy. It was, of course, fundamentally a matter of indifference whether the original hung here or at Gustav’s. Gustav had, no doubt, more appreciation of it. He certainly had more time to look at it, and it was hung in a better position in his house.

Ultimately, too, Gustav really had a better right to it. Still, it was annoying to feel that from now on he, Martin, would no longer have the original before his eyes.

The past of the buisness the grandfaather that bstarted it but now that world had shrunk.

 

The book follows the family we learn that the grandfather of one of the main characters started the furniture business started by Emanuel Opper, a merchant who settled in Berlin and started the furniture business by selling to the German army. Now a successful business, we meet his grandson Gustav, a writer in the middle of writing a biography of Gotthold Lessing this comes up throughout the book as he is working and reworking the book, His two other brothers, Martin he is the ones running the family business and it is his world we see changing a lot and the other brother Edgar a doctor is suffering by the rise of antisemitism and lose of patients then the loss of his job at the hospital. We see this happening as it is heading to 1933 the family and friends around them in the Jewish community as others decide to go abroad to Switzerland. Other friends think it will not get worse; others, like the Oppermanns, try their best to get by in this shrinking world of freedoms and chances. First, they changed the name of the business to a German name then they had to merge with a business. Their house is raided, and things are taken. This finally makes them think of escape.

The question of transferring Oppermann’s FurnitureStores to Jaques Lavendel, who was a naturalised American citizen, had been under consideration several times; but the idea had been abandoned for various reasons. Curiously enough, Martin did not now advance any one of the many practical objections but said rather spitefully, ‘Lavendel would not be a good name for our stores.’ ‘I know that,’ replied Jaques quietly. ‘As far as I know there never was any question of it,’ he added, smiling.

The transformation of the two branches into the GermanFurniture Company was really not quite as simple as it appeared. There was a mass of details to be discussed; Jaques Lavendel had many useful suggestions to offer. Martin had to admit that Jaques was the more resourceful of the two of them.He expressed his thanks. Jagues stood up and took his leave with a firm, hearty handshake. ‘I, too, thank you sincerely,’ said Liselotte warmly in her strong, deep voice.

The having to change name and the owner of the buisnees to avoid losing it fully.

Originally he had worked this as a film script to be made into a film in the UK about the rise nazism and how easy it is to see the world shrink and people change, but then the film was dropped, and he reworked it into a novel, I loved how it drew you into their world and how you see the slowly the darkness and hate to draw in around them.  It is a family saga of a family being slowly pulled apart, and that is the beauty of this book it is subtle. The things happening around them come bit by bit, always feeling this is it, and then the next thing happens to them, but no. His books were burned by the Nazis at the time he was one of the best-known German writers alive. His work had been translated into English, but his book had dropped out of print until Persephone brought him back into print I hope the other two books in this trilogy come out for me this is an important book it was on the Deutsch Welle top 100 German books as the choice for 1933 (a great list for anyone wanting some new books in German to read). So this is my second book for this year, German lit month and a great discovery. Have you read this book ?

Winston score – +A Powerful yet subtle look at one Jewish family as Fascism rises in Berlin

Blueprint by Theresia Enzensberger

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Blueprint by Theresia Ezensberger

German fiction

Original title – Blaupause

Translator – Lucy Jones

Source – Personal copy

I have been missing this year’s German lit month. Still, I think for the first time in years, I just hadn’t planned for this month, so I am posting a lot fewer books than I have in other years, but this is the first of two books I will be reviewing. You know, strangely, it isn’t too. I came to sit and do this review; I think the two books have similar themes in the time they were set and the underlying story of the time, both set in the years before World War Two. But this is a modern story written by the daughter of one of Germany’s leading thinkers, Hans Magnus Enzenberger, a cultural commenter. This was her debut novel, and she has since written a second novel, which was listed for the German book prize when it came out last year.

For a moment, Gropius seems confused at my being in his room; then he collects himself. ‘Come in, sit down. What can I do for you?’ Now it’s my turn to be confused. He’s the one who asked me to come, after all, so why do I have to explain myself?

Perhaps institutional mechanisms at the Bauhaus work in the usual bureaucratic way – an invisible hand consisting of protocol, regulations and appointments bringing people together who aren’t exactly sure how they ended up there.

I explain that I’m new to the Bauhaus and that I was asked to introduce myself and bring my portfolio. Gropius’ face brightens.’Ah, that’s right, a new student.

Luise meets the great man as she is due to start at the Bauhaus as a student

Blueprint is about a student, Luise Schilling. She has lived in a traditional family in Berlin and wants to change the world around her as she studies architecture. She has decided to go to the Bah=uhaus and study under Gropius. We see her meet the man himself but get drawn to the alternative thoughts and lifestyle of those studying at the Bauhaus. The young Luise is drawn to a group of students following a spiritual path and an enigmatic student, Jakob, who is involved with the group. This is a girl becoming a woman as her eyes are opened by the students and world around her. But this is the late twenties, and events back with her family in Berlin, where violence is bubbling under the surface of the city. Whilst she is with her parents. This is all before the Bauhaus moves to it famous home, which happens later in the book. There is also the tale of her trying to get her ideas around social housing accepted.

Luise Schilling: There Goes the Neighborhood. Social Enclaves in the Shadow of Urban Planning, Sichter Verlag, Stuttgart. 368 pages, 12,80 DM

If you’re interested in architecture, these days, chances are you’re probably interested in the Bauhaus school.

Such a proclivity will make this book by German-born American, Luise Schilling, who studied architecture at the Bauhaus before the war, all the more astounding. For her There Goes The Neighborhood, she makes a case against the kind of holistic city planning preached and practised at the Bauhaus. Instead, Schilling demands that the city is seen as it is: a cluster of small, independent economic zones and organic communities. According to the author’s indignant thesis, urban planners are out of touch with urban populations.

Later her ideas get taken on board as show later near the end of the book.

There are benefits and downsides to her choice to use the Bauhaus as the book’s centre; that is, we all know of it, but then it, for me, needs a little more depth around Groupis. The main thing is that it makes you want to read the book but then feel you want more of the Bauhaus. But then it is mainly Luise’s story, which is one of a woman growing up escaping an overbearing father and initially finding freedom of thought and ideas in a group of students. Still, later in the book, we see how, in a way, the restrictions of her being a female are still there when her ideas are sidelined. But then later, when seen after the war, her accurate visionary idea comes to light. Add to this is the story of what is happening in the background with her family in Berlin, away from the dreamland that is Basuhaus and the events that lead to the rise of Hitler are there to be seen. The other book I am about to finish is set a few years after this and shows the events after this book well. Have you read this or any books by her father? I have a book under review by him as well.

Winston’s score – B – a great coming-of-age story that shows how females still couldn’t go as far as they wanted, even in the Bauhaus.

Rombo by Esther Kinsky

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Rombo by Esther Kisky

German fiction

Original title – Rombo

Translator- Caroline Schimdt

Source – review copy

There is a few writers that I really really love, and Kinsky is one of them. She is one of those writers I think I love her shopping list because, you know, with her, it wouldn’t just be a shopping list. She is cut from the same writing style as Seabed and Kluge another two writers I adore. Ester Kinky lived in London for many years. She was married to the late German translator Martin Chalmers. The last book I read by her saw how she dealt with that grief. She is also a translator from English, Polish and Russian into German. She is the German translator of Olga Tokarczuk ( This has a feel of flights at times). She now lives in Berlin.

Among the boulders, pebbles and shards of glass washed milky and smooth are variously sized concrete fragments that stand tilted, defying the water in a different way than the leftover solid and stony things which gradually submit to the currents and learn to want to reach the sea. The concrete fragments are rigid and in-flexible, positioning themselves against any current.

They distinguish themselves from the meticulously smooth stones with implicit drawings and lines and veins of a different nature, and seek the edges, the banks, the coves set apart from the current, where they come into their own as wreckage, maintain their fragmented nature and remain witness: earthquake breakage, remains of house and farm and charge, things carted away that do not submit to anything new. A young addition to the old river: the earthquake rubble.

The way the enviroment his hit as hard as those that live there !

What she does here is take a slice and event the world-changing earthquakes 0f 1976 in the Friuli area of Northeast Italy. She takes apart the events through one village and seven of the people that lived in that village and she how their lives were ripped apart after the earthquake in May 1976 as we hear the memories of that event from seven people and how each of their worlds was ripped apart and how it affected their families and changed there lives alongside this there is how the earthquake had changed the world around the people and also a collection of found items photos of those who were just lost in the events the two earthquakes months apart left nearly a thousand dead but also changed the course of so many lives like the seven Silvia on holidays Toni remembering their car. Mara thought of how many kids her mother had given birth to. Lina remembered a neighbour’s laughs as out hit each recalls over the course of the book the events and the aftermath of it on them.

MARA
My mother gave birth to nine children. Three died, three went abroad and never returned. At first they wrote occasionally, or sent a photograph, but eventually even that stopped. My mother began forgetting early on. She forgot the soup on the stove and the goats in the shed and her basket on the field. But if one of us became sick, without a word she walked to a spot where some herb grew, to remedy the illness. And she always knew where to find her favourite flowers. Sometimes she sat outside on the bench and rocked back and forth, speaking with her children dead and disappeared. She was still able to remember their names, but not ours. Had she forgotten us? I’m not sure. Although I cared for her, I was no one to her – she called me and my remaining siblings by random names, never by our own. And later, when I had to lock her in her room, she would hit and scratch me. But her children who had disappeared, who had left – they were still with her. What does it mean to remember, what does it mean to forget?

Mara thinking  of her mother and her siblings

Kinsky is a writer in the vein of Seabald. More so, Alexander  Kluge, I’d say, as his work uses a patchwork of vignettes of memories of events. to recall and describe what happens, voices and facts mix together. These make books that have no straightforward linear narrative to them, but the work is more like a giant portrait of the event given 3d and even a fourth dimension of time, as a whole, does not form a picture of the events and as you move out from the reading you see the possibilities of those earthquakes but also the aftermath which is something you don’t often see mentioned is how people cope after the event and how it changes there lives. As the book firmly ties those seven lives to the environment they live in, and the environment of those remote mountains themselves are a character twisted and changed as much as those that live on them. A combination of the life of those seven before, during and after is drawn into the pattern of words that form her style. Have you read any books by Ester kinsky or Alexander Kluge using this vignette style?

Winstons score – `+ A  – Every book by her I have read is in the top books of the year and this is just the same.

Ada’s Realm by Sharon Doudua Otoo

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Ada’s Realm by Sharon Dodua Otoo

German fiction

Original title – Ada’s Raun

Translator – Jon Cho-Polizzi

Source – Review copy

I am a fan of writers that have a story in the bio, and Sharon seems to be one of those writers. Born in London to Ghanaian parents in London she, like I did decided she would live in  Germany, unlike me who returned after a couple of years she stayed on and made her home in Berlin. She has been a poet and writer all that time initially, her first two novellas were published in English, and then she chose to start writing in German, so her first novel is in her new language. She had already won one of the biggest German literature prizes for a short story she had written. This book covers centuries and uses a number of women sharing the same first name over those years.

Totope, March 1459

During the longest night of the year, blood clung to my forehead and my baby died. Finally. He had whimpered in his final moments, and Naa Lamiley had caressed his cheek. How lovely, I had thought, that this would be his final memory. She lay just beside him, the child between us, and her head resting next to mine. Naa Lamiley’s eyes shimmered as she assured me it would not be much longer now, “God willing”. She whispered because all of our mothers were sleeping on the other side of the room, but Naa Lamiley’s voice would have given out at any moment anyway. Together, we had cried and prayed at my baby’s side the last three nights. I could barely hear her, and 1 understood her even less.

The book oopens with Ada losing another baby in Birth!

From the first Ada is in africa when we meet her she has lost a child and is geiving in 15th century Ghana as she loses anpother child just after birth . This is a book about shared sorrow and can you hold the past of someone with the same name it is a richly weaved novel that sees uis next in Victorian London and Ada Lovelace (Stranger this is the second novel this year she has cropped up in as a character in Thread Ripper) with nan imagined relationship; with Dickens then we are in another Ada a Polish woman now but is it the same soul and she is trying to get by in a Nazi death camp.what would this Ada do to get by !! the story seems to circle in on itself and we have a Ghanian Ada in modern day Berlin on the hunt for a roof over her head. The four womans stories twist and turn through out the book so we have a book like a escher painting as we go across the centuries and coninents to see each ada in there time and how it has a ripple effect on each other!

Lizzie had looked away because she was not quite sure of the answer herself. She had no idea that I was calling her. In the end, she attributed her disturbance to the fact that – despite it all – she still worried about her mistress.

Should Mr Dickens yet be present when Lord King arrived, Lizzie could not imagine that Lady Ada would get out of the ensuing confrontation unscathed.

In victorian London Ada Lovelace and DIckens meet ?

This is a wonderfully playful book with narrative and linear structure as it breaks them up as I say iot is like an Escher painting as no matter what time it is the woman seem to be in the same holwe and have the saeme issues of sex, race and postion in the world . WHat is even more impressive such a cimpolex beast has been brought out by a writer in a second languane . But part of me wonders does it work better like that written in German for Sharon as a writer. Just imagine for a moment if Toni  morrison and WG sebald had a bastard child this would be the book she would write.No doubt as  it mixes thoughts about  places and race history and also how it cvan sometimes coil on itself remember Sebalds books twisted one way and then another and Morrison alway showed how important race can be in peoples lifes. so what we have is an epic book with four woman at its heart. Showinfg even thou time has moved that one soul maybe can repeat the same things loss of a child, love, Just serving via sex and then having a home those basic human needs and rights through the ages. Have you read any of Sharons books? Or any writers that have written books in two languages ?

WEinstons score – + A – This is a writer to watch a strong voice and not afraid to take risks with her writing and brings them of in stunning style !!

Karios by Jenny Erpenbeck

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Karios by Jenny Erpenbeck

German Fiction

Original title- Karios

Translator Michael Hoffman

Source – Library

I’m back I had spent the last week in Scotland and had hoped to blog but time was against me so I return with a writer I have in the past struggled with in the past some writers I don’t connect with as much as others do and I feel this is the way with Erpenbeck. It isn’t the fact I don’t like her writing I just don’t get why so many others love it when it too me is just average any way this was in the lOcal Library sir I decided as it would be a Booker international book for next year I would read it. I want to see if this is a more personal story of a relationship that broke up being looked back on after the death pod one of the two lovers.

She has a suitcase of her own, full of letters, carbons, and souvenirs,”at product” for the most part, as the archivists like to say. Her own diaries and journals. The next day she climbs up the library steps and takes it down from the top shelf, it’s incredibly dusty inside and out. A long time ago, the papers in his boxes and those in her suitcase were speaking to each other. Now they’re both speaking to time. A suitcase like that, cardboard boxes like that, full of middles and endings and beginnings, buried under decades’ worth of dust; pages that were written to deceive alongside other pages that were striving for truth;

The past in a few boxes is picked apart

The book opens as Katherina remembers its she is asked to the funeral of Hans a much old writer she once had a relationship as she works through she has a suitcase and boxes from him as they form a casket of ghosts of this relationship as she works through those years and their relationship. They initially are perfect although he is maybe a father figure come lover for her at times he likes to show her what he knows and try and make her understand. The relationship is one of him trying to mould her and her much younger infatuation with the older man which is as we know never a good combination for relationships this has been the plot of many a book over the years. But as ever this is set in the downfall of EAST Germany from the early days when they are in a stable east to the tremors and then the downfall of the country and all the changes in the dynamics of the relationship add to that the discovery of Hans that his young lover had a one night stand this one moment serves as a turning point in their relationship as his view and treatment of Katherina changes and the story takes a darker turn all together

All fragments, fragments of endings, fragments of beginnings.Katharina leaves the two black bags, stuffed full of the life of the last six months, untouched, and a few days later takes them to her new apartment: back courtyard, old tenement building, studio room.Just a moment ago, she was working at the printshop, now her training is over, she is a qualified worker, she has successfully concluded her course in typography, and she’s writing her resignation letter:As per our spoken agreement and by mutual consent, I hereby request the termination of my contract with the Staatsverlag, Berlin, effective on July 7, 1987, the July 1 having been granted me for my move, and the days from July 2 TO 6 for my regulation Holiday. At this time, I love and do continue to love the regular freelance broadcaster and writer , Hans W

Later on and the relationship has changed

This is a wonderful insight into a relationship that is always doomed there is always an imbalance at the heart of the relationship add this to the backdrop of the wall falling and the effect that had on the two of them. I do wonder in this part of her life did Jenny have an old partner at some point it? A dark look at the heart of a relationship imploding and how someone you love can be so brutal is so well brought off here. It also shows the difference in the generations Hans is a perfect example of a man that grew up in the East and because of his job and he was happy in the East as in fact, that was all he knew. Kathrina wants to break free like many of her young peers did at the time. Well, I like her more after this book bit she seems to have opened up a bit in this book the voice of her as a writer felt stronger I do wonder if that is Hoffmann who has also brought her writing to life for me a bit more?  I think this will be a Booker international contender next year. If Gunter Von hagens wrote about relationships rather than doing autopsies this would be how he wrote.

Winstons score A -A doomed relationship in a doomed country is pulled apart after a death.

 

In the Belly of the Queen by Karosh Taha

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In the Belly of the Queen by Karosh Taha

German Fiction

Original title -Im Bauch der Königin

Translator Grashina Gabelmann

Source – Review copy

I was sent this unusual book from V&Q by the Kurdish-German writer Karosh Taha; she came to Germany with her parents when she was just ten. Her family settled in Duisburg, which isn’t to far from the part of Germany in Kleve in the Ruhr area. She had trained as an English teacher and worked teaching English initially as her writing career took off. This is her second novel. Both are set and deal with close-knit Kurdish communities living in Germany in high-rise buildings. This book tells the same story from two different angles and can be read in two ways female first, then a male story or the opposite. Way around. The book uses a fight Amal has with her young classmate Younes and the book is told from her perspective and Younes’s best friend Rafiq’s perspective.

I tell Younes my father never wore jeans, and he nods, he knows that, and he smokes like my father did. Younes remembers my father better than his own. For Younes, his father means waiting and enduring, enduring the wait.
I tell Younes he only ever wore black trousers with his shirt loosely tucked in, he was lanky, that’s why the shirt fluttered around the sides of his torso – his clothes seemed too large for his body, yet just right. His only accessory was nonchalance, and I wonder how he dresses now, whether he still wears clothes from his time as a student.

Amal remembering her father and the way he was.

As I said, the book is really two novellas that follow the same events over the same time frame from Amal the young female and the main character of the book. As she hits the young Younes, her father jumps to protect his daughter, but he abruptly leaves her, and she ends up. Living with the boy she hit and his mother, as they like her, have been pushed outside. Her father defended her, but at what cost to himself and what knock-on effect does this have on her life after this, even in this close-knit community as Younes is an outsider due to his mother Shahira, a free spirit, a woman that lives by her own rule. This world of Younes. We see through the eyes of his best friend Rafiq, a young boy initially drawn to his mate’s mum but then repulsed by her free spirit as he sees his Kurdish culture come through. But he ends up in a relationship with the equally free-spirited Aal. What does he want thou, Rafiq? This is the sound of the two cultures clashing the tight-knit and relatively similar to their homeland Kurdish community. They live in the high rise tight-knit choking on its way, or can they escape to live as Germans? All these floats around the three youngsters as they grow up. This book has layers to it it follows the aftermath of one event and the tug of war growing up in this situation. This is maybe closer to English books like Brick Lane or the early books from Hanif Kureishi than most German books.

I want Shahira  to lick her spoon; I want to see her tongue wan. But she never does, and she’s always pleased to see me tion. burn in, Raffig: She saunters barefoot into the kitchen She’s wearing leggings like the girls in our year, with her shir just covering her butt. Every curve’s still visible. When she’s nor wearing heels, she’s the same height as Amal, and I could easily put my arm around her. Her dark hair falls in waves over her breasts and shoulders. Sometimes she puts her hair up – then you can see her neck, which is browner than the rest of her body.I don’t know what her belly looks like or the folds underneath her arse. Amal’s are white because she goes to the tanning studio.Shahira sometimes tans in the afternoon sun, but not often – it gives you ugly wrinkles and spots, she says. She used to sit on her balcony wearing a summer dress and let the sun shine on herglistening legs for half an hour

Rafiq sexual awakening are muddled here

This is another book that reminds me of my time in Germany. I worked alongside a number of refugees some from Iraq and others from Former Yugoslavia. Some people in this book could have quickly been working in the Jugendwerkstatt I worked at. The wonder of this story is how it shows the gender divide in the community she grew up in and how people can view one event and the aftermath differently over time. It follows a girl that goes on to be a very strong woman in Amal. But it also shows the outfall of war and having to move on children when thrust into a different society with different rules. As I said, this book is maybe nearer to some books like Bribk Lane or A book like Interpreter of Maldives, both books that follow second-generation immigrants, those kids growing up on that divide between family past and the present and the country they live in. I loved the use of two narrations for the same event it is like what Durrel did with Alexandra Quartet as the same timeframe is told two ways the unreliable nature of the youngster’s narrative comes to the fore, and also how swayed they can be by gender and their own culture. Have you read this unusual book ?

Winston’s score – A – This is a look at growing up in two cultures in this case in Germany but it is a universal story of two cultures clashing

While we were Dreaming by Clemens Meyer

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While we were Dreaming by Clemens Meyer

German Fiction

Original title -Als wir träumten

Translator – Katy Derbyshire

Source – Personal copy (I did have an e-galley)

I am late to a couple of the international booker reviews. I have left this as it was my personal favourite of this years longlist. Meyer is a writer whose work I have long admired. He was first brought to us by And other stories that brought out All the Lights which I reviewed on the blog 12 years ago. He has since then been published by Fitzcaraldo; such is the nature of books in translation that this was his debut novel, and his second novel, bricks and mortar, which I had also reviewed, came out I loved. But this novel captures him. as a raw young writer. Meyer is a writer who has lived a life growing up in the East. He has worked blue-collar jobs as a security guard and forklift driver. He has been in the situations and worlds his characters live in. This writer has lived in part of the world he writes about, and this group of lads trying their best to make their way in their world after the wall fell and their world changed utterly.

The shooting was over. The green lamp at the shooting range for the electric rifles had lit up one last time, a hit, my last shot, six out of ten, not bad at all, and the pop of the air rifles had stopped over in Room Two where the Free German Youth had been shooting. We put the electric rifles down on the tables and went to the door.
‘Did you see, Danny? I was really good,’ Mark said down in the schoolyard, and he laughed and slapped his chest. ‘Almost like Old Surehand! You’ll never beat my nine

The boys at the fair shooting early on things get darker when they get older .

 

This classic piece Bildungsroman focuses on the tight n=knit group of four boys living in Leipzig and trying to see the world beyond their brewery quarter hard living tough streets.Rico, Mark, Paul and Daniel. We see their world as they try to get through every day in their hard-hitting world. From drinking, stealing cars, Danny getting prison tattoos, the boxing matches, this is a man’s world. Danny and his dad support football his dad an alcoholic. We see the football club they love and the violence involved in the football of the late 90s, as the boys try to get to Manhood as they run through the nights, escaping the law and running illegal clubs. This is a world of a world emerging from oppression, hope but no hope really at this time. Danny is Meyer. He is, as Tony put it in our group chat, the one that is there but seems to avoid the worst of the trouble. One imagines Clemens has rewritten himself slightly.

the Tattooist and Thilo the Drinker donit know each other, and that’s a good thing cause Thilo be Drinker talks a lot of crap and pisses people off and wort stop talking stupid crap at them when he’s had a drink and he’s almost always drinking.
Tattoo-Thilo doesn’t drink much; he broke the habit in jail. He’s been to jail a couple of times even though hes not yet twenty, and he doesn’t like people talking stupid crap at him. I don’t know exactly what he did time for, but GBH was on the list.
I get my tats from Tattoo-Thilo ’cause he’s got a pretty good reputation when it comes to tats, not just in our neighbourhood. Rico told me there are even guys from the red-light district who go to him, and Rico got inked by him as well, but that was in jail. Rico doesn’t talk about jail much, but I know almost all tattooists get their training there.

Danny gets his tattoos

I was drawn to this before it came out or was on the list of comparisons to Irvine Welsh. I get that part.I was a huge Welsh fan back in the day. I was in my 20s a lad I loved drinking, loved football, got in fights, have been in tricky situations and have known a number of shady characters, but I am maybe more of a Danny than any of the other characters I am a bit straight-laced at times. But to me, this is more bloody Shane Meadows all four of these characters could have fallen off the screen into the pages of This is England series set over the same period and also following a similar group of lads through their ups and downs. I know there is a film of this but I tell you, Meadows would make this book a masterpiece of a film. It captures the lost hope of the working-class world. It is the ghost of those early Springsteen songs running the streets on the edge of the law. It is hard to hold back how much I loved this it reminds me of the kitchen sink and working-class novels I loved in my youth. Have you read any books from Meyer?

Winston’s score of A++++++++ is just stunning !!!

Liminal by Roland Schimmelpfennig

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Liminal by Roland Schimmelpfennig

German Fiction

Original title –Die Linie zwischen Tag und Nacht

Translator – Jamie Bulloch

Source – Review copy

I was excited when this dropped through my; letterbox as I was a massive fan of Roland’s first novel to be translated into English, which had come out several years ago and also had one of the memorable titles of recent years ‘One Clear, ice-cold January Morning at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century. I said at the time, he is actually best known as a Playwright in his homeland as his plays are amongst the best known in the German-speaking world, and he is the most performed in Germany. He initially worked as a journalist before turning to Drama. The German title is the line between day and night, and that is what the book centres on the situation of people caught between the world of the day and the dark of the night.

Two helicopters circled above Görlitzer Park, but they were flying far too close to one another; what if they touched, what if they plummeted from the sky into the dancing crowd?

But were there really two helicopters circling above us?Maybe it was just one; having been awake for more than twenty-four hours I might be seeing double.

Dancing next to me by the canal were a Colombian draughtswoman, a Croatian roofer, a Portuguese waitress, a Syrian IT guy, an Indian girl who could breathe fire, and a very tall, very thin, bearded Russian who described himself as a mystic. The Russian, Ivan, was the only one I knew.

All of them were wide awake yet deathly tired, and they all shared what they had on them: cocaine, MDMA, ketamine, speed, beer and vodka.

The nscene as the body drifted past Tommy and nthe fellow Clubbers

 

The book opens with the line she floated in her white wedding dress on the green water. A dead woman is floating past a techno club in Berlin, and no one bats an eye not sure if it is just a show or something but it is Tommy, a disgraced drugs officer, that sees that girl is dead and isn’t some sort of art piece floating by the multitudes dance a collection of Croatian roofers, Portuguese waitress a tall thin Russian this is the collection of people that have drunk and taken drugs together in the club all that night. Tommy decides to discover more about the dead girl, a journey that takes =him to the dark heart of Berlin’s nightclub scene. Drawn into the world he used to try and police. He was a great officer, but he got tainted by the drugs and drawn into the night as he drags this dead girl out of the canal, he has to face his past mistakes and try and discover who she was and also how she ended up floating dead in a wedding dress down a canal as the clubbers just carried on dancing.

I sat with Gianni in the restaurant, which was still empty.By now we were onto our fourth grappa.

We talked about Csaba. We talked about saba’s trip to Hamburg.

-That’s what he’s like, Gianni said. It’s not greed, it’s a lack of restraint.

Gianni asked me about the dead woman in the canal. I asked him how he knew about her and he said, I was there.

Half the city was there. The television cameras were there.

You’re famous, Tommy, but then again you’ve been famous for a while now.

Gianni made a gesture as if he were holding a camera.- It was nice to see you, Chef de Police à bord, he said as I made to leave. “Chef de Police à bord” is what Csaba once called me.

Tommy has to go into his own past as he tries to find out what has happened!

This isn’t a thriller or a road trip into the dark heart of the club scene and its darker side the drugs and how so many young people fall along the way.  We follow Tommy as he wades through the flotsam and jetsom that is the line between the sea of drugs and the land of the day and everyone else. Tommy knows this place well he has been caught up in his own flotsam and jetsom for far too long. This would make a great Wim Wender film s it has Berlin at is heart and Wenders Berlin, through his lens also captured that line between day and night, between drugs and trying to live in the day. This is the story that should be his next movie. I was reminded of some of the scenes in Wenders Faraway so close. So many souls in this book had drifted off in the sea of drug casualties of the night. Have you read any books by Schimmelpfenig or seen his plays ?

Winstons score – +A One of the best books from Germany I have read in recent years.

Walking in Berlin by Franz Hessel

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Walking in Berlin by Franz Hessel

German Non-fiction

Original title – Spazieren in Berlin

Translator – Amanda DeMarco

Source – personal copy

I managed to just squeeze the third read in for this week’s 1929 club and it was one I saw on the list of books when the year was announced earlier this year and was reminded about it I had seen it when it came out and had intended to look at it then but it had passed me by. So to get back to it Franz Hessel he was a friend of the great Walter Benjamin who has an essay at the start of the book about the book. He calls how Hessel a flaneur should look t the city afresh. The city of his birth with fresh eyes. Hessel himself with Benjamin had translated the works of Proust into German.

In the half-light of tinted lamps hanging in a number of smaller halls and rooms in the north as well as the west, same-sex couples circulate, here the girls and there the lads. Sometimes the girls are dressed, in a more or less pleasant manner, as men, and the lads as ladies. Over time their appetites, once a bold protest against the dominant moral laws, have become a rather harmless pleasure, and visitors who like to dance with the opposite sex are also allowed into these mellow orgies. They find a particularly favourable environment here. The men learn new nuances in tenderness from the female cavaliers, their partners learn from the masculine ladies, and your own “straight”-ness becomes a peculiar stroke of luck, as it makes you seem rather exotic. Oh, and the light fixtures are positively magnificent: wooden or metal lanterns with serrated frames, reminiscent of the fretwork of our boyhood.

I was reminded of cabaret her and imagine Isherwood sitting in his Berlin

I loved the idea of this book as I had just rewatched the two films Tilda Swinton had made more than 20 years apart, in fact, they could be seen as a cousin of these the first was just at the cusp of the wall falling and the second is the unified Berlin. She covers the same route on a bike across Berlin many points on her route  Hessel visited in his book. t Hessel had walked his Berlin in the late twenties what I first got from the book is that he had a way of looking but not jading the times one passage in the book really grabbed me about girls looking like boys and boys looking like Girls those characters that had fallen out of Cabaret or an Isherwood novel of the time. He captures a city that has underneath the horror that happened in the 15 years after he walk the city. meandering the city that would a few years later be gone. The longest piece is on a tour called the tour of the churches like St Peters etc. Also the old Royal buildings of Berlin, and the National Gallery. This is a flaneur a wander of the city this metropolis his fellow citizens. Then the Zoo places like the Newspaper district a place I wonder is dead like Fleet Street its London counterpart.

Excursioners in light-colored skirts and shift dresses climb the steps leading up to the station. Those lucky things, enjoying such a nice autumn day. Some also go through the narrow entrance to the little Wannsee train station. What I’d really like to do is follow them. A sail. boat, or even just a paddleboat.1 Potsdam and the Havel. see, the secret soul of Berlin, otherworldly places here on earth! And today a weekday. But now we’re arriving at Potsdamer Platz. The first thing to say about it is that it isn’t really a plaza at all, but rather what they call a carrefour in Paris, a crossroads, an intersection; we don’t really have the right word for it in German. That Berlin once came to an end at the city gate here, with country roads branching off from it–you’d have to have a well-informed eye to recognize that from the shape of the inter-section.

Part of the longest section of the book the Tour which remind me of Bois as Homer as he walked down Potsdamer Platz

Another image that came to mind when I read this was of Homer played by Curt Bois in Wings of desire (I so want the blu ray box set of Wenders going out soon but it is out of my price range I’ll have to wait). Bois’s character is seeking what was Potsdamer Platz in the rubble of the city in the late 80s. Bois walk also has old film of Potsdamer back in the day (Hessel is by Potsdamer in the section Fashion around Fashion houses and shops in the city and also the tor section). It’s a Shame Hessel died in the early years of the war in France a follow-up to this would be great like Swinton and my own remembrance of the city I have only been for a day and wish I could go back to Berlin it is a city that has had so many changes in the nearly hundred years since this book came out. This book is a forerunner of Psychogeography a distant cousin of Benjamins Opus to Paris Arcades (I have been reading this on and off for years ). Have you read this or any other great flaneur works of people wandering cities on foot and just taking it in like it was new and fresh to the writer’s eyes.

Winston’s score – A- a gem from this week’s 1929 club reminds me of a place I’d love to go and explore more and each for his ghosts and the ghost of what happened.

Cinema Stories by Alexander kluge

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Cinema Stories by Alexander kluge

German fiction

original title – Geschichten vom Kino

translators – Martin Brady and Helen Hughes

Source – personal copy

If you have been following me for the last couple of years you will know since I discovered the works of Alexander Kluge. for me he should be better known than he is all those people going on about Sebald well this guy is like him but has been writing his documentary-style fiction usually around an event or subject I have reviewed four books by him so far. I have just been navigating on a personal odyssey through his works as I buy them. This is one of the books that maybe cross over his two main fields of filmmaker and writer. As ever it is a series of Vignettes 39 in total.

The ELDORADO movie theatre was located close to the border dividing the centre of Beirut from the South of the city, and still within the area destroyed by aerial bombing. Razed to the ground, only the foundation remained. The married couple who had run the venue for decades had cleared away the rubble and erected a tent on the flat concrete floor of the building, The projectors, which had been rescued, stood under this tent. In front of them, are rows of makeshift seats (chairs from a cafe); and in front of those, the screen. The sound of battle, sometimes coming closer, sometimes moving away, merged with the soundtrack of the films. The audience was somewhat safer under this tented roof than in the surviving houses, because destroyed buildings were seldom attacked for a second time and also because in this “cinema auditorium” there was no danger of being buried by falling masonry

The opening of the book and the story cinema in a state of Emergency

I will mention a few of the vignettes and leave you a lot to discover they are all around the subject of cinemas. The collection opens with a story that is a little way reminds me of a scene from the film Cinema Paradiso this is the story of a cinema in Beirut and the couple that ran the Eldorado cinema trying to keep it running with the war going on and how they showed whatever they could get hold of it to remind of when the cinema burnt down in cinema Paradiso and the carried on. Then we see how Erich Von Stroheim maybe was one of the first people in the film industry to invent who he was not the son of a hatmaker from Vienna he became a von and lived up whole was working his way up through the cinema. Then he turns to Walter Benjamin and his observations on how cinema and films can be used as propaganda. Then I read one that was a connection to a book that I had read that was by the wife of the Filmmaker Joris Ivens here we see how when his filming was interrupted by rain he then made a piece describing fourteen types of rain, like rain in the country, never-ending rain and the concentrated rain in Hurricanes. This is just a glimpse of the book I feel it is hard to write about many of the 39 vignettes in the collection.`I want to leave a few to be discovered.

1 A week of Rain with Joris Ivens

The radical documentarist Joris Ivens took advantage of a week of rain in Holland, during which he couldn’t shoot anything else, to film variations on the theme of rain. Hannes Eisler later composed music for these film sequences. His piece is called fourteen ways to describe rain

It reminds me of how many words the Inuit have for snow types and looks of snow. And how many words do we have for rain here in the UK!!

 

this book mixes the two worlds that Alexander Kluge is best known for cinema there is a real sense of some of these small tales he’ll have heard over the years and then he has used his writing talent to bring some of those sorts of insider tales gems he will have heard or even been involved with. The vignettes cover a myriad of subjects from actual cinemas, to what the power of film is to actors, filmmakers and myths of cinema. For me he is a writer you just want to read cover to cover in every book he is like that uncle with the great stories we all have someone that can talk and describe the world around us and make it interesting and Kluge’s world is c=inema he is an insider and these are those tales. I am still not sure why he isn’t better known here in English maybe it is the fact he falls in between styles of writing as a writer he has parts of short stories, narrative non-fiction, memoir or documentary fiction he is a polymath a true gem of the German cultural scene. Have you a favourite book from Kluge?

Winstons score – + A compelling vignette around his other job as a filmmaker.