Tag: german lit

On the edge by Markus werner

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On the Edge by Markus Werner

Swiss fiction

Original title – Am Hang

Translator – Robert E Goodwin

Source – Personal copy

I don’t know about you, but you buy books over the years and think you have read one of the books from a writer to find out you hadn’t, so when you do finally get to them, you go, ” Why did it take so long to get to them. That is the case with Markus Werner. I brought Zundel’s exit in 2018. I was buying as many old DALKEY archive books as I could. I thought I had read this book back in 2018. I must have read 20 or so pages when it came, and thought I would get to it. But not so when the other day, when I happened to need a short book to read, I also had On the Edge by him, oh, and Cold Shoulder, and the recent frog in the throat that NYRB had brought out.  Werner was one of those who came to writing late.  He had been a teacher and was a huge fan of his fellow Swiss writer Max Frisch, but he didn’t get his first novel published till he was 40. He then wrote seven novels, all of which had won prizes.  This was his last Novel before he died.

Loos drank. I was amazed how much he could handle. He spoke with self-control, hardly ever raised the glass in toast, and sat like a rock.

He did, however, sweat a lot and wiped his gleaming scalp with a handkerchief from time to time. ‘You despise the world, don’t you?’ I asked. ‘With all my heart, he replied, without the least hesitation. Tm relieved, then, I said, which ruffled his composure a bit. He scratched his neck and searched all his pockets for the lighter which lay in front of him on the table. ‘You know, I said, ‘someone recently explained to me that hatred was the precondition of love. Loos turned red, and just as I was beginning to worry that he would reach for the cheese knife again, he gave a short burst of laughter followed by a fit of giggling that he had to fight to control. His laughter lightened my mood and released the cramped tension his stony earnestness had made me feel. I felt I could risk treading a little more boldly. I asked him whether he might not be one of those failed idealists, so notorious in his generation, who resent the world for ignoring their dreams. Wasn’t it perhaps easier to despise reality than to revise the wishful ideas he had of it as a youth

The two drink over the evening and the talk grabs you

This book is a great two-hander. The book is a series of meals over the Pentecost weekend in the Swiss Alps, as two men meet in a hotel. Clarin is the main character, and we are reading his account of this weekend. He is a divorce lawyer and has spent this weekend finishing a piece he has been working on for a long time about the ins and outs of divorce laws across the various cantons in Switzerland. So when he is met by an older, outspoken man who ends up spending a couple of evenings with him, Loos, this man is a widower, and the conversation shows how poles apart the two men are in their views. Loos a man that o loved his wife, loved being a husband and Clarin a single man that has had affairs over the years but due to his job views the world of marriage with much distain. ADD TO THIS loos smokes and is struggling with the modern world cell phones, cycling shorts and how the world is going. He is a man with many opinions, but who is he? Is he someone Clarins may have crossed before? Loos isn’t his real name it seems ?

Drops of rain were falling, but Loos seemed not to notice. He did pause, but I saw that he still had more to say. ‘Well, I said. ‘Well, he said, if we now add to the new form of overburdening that we ve already mentioned the even newer form, which consists first in our vain and panting efforts to slow the stormy tempo of development in science and technology and second in our ashen-faced realisation that all the knowledge and understanding we have acquired today will be yesterday’s snow tomorrow – then, I think, my claim of a psychological malaise of unprecedented proportions is not too outlandish. How will it proceed? Dare we hope for a revolution of the snails? What do you think? ‘I think it’s raining, I said, ‘and that we should move? “It is indeed raining, he said.

Later on the next night

I loved this so much, it reminds me of Pinter in a way, the two-handed way the book was told, these two men sat eating, drinking, and talking at opposite ends of the spectrum, about their views and values around not just marriage, but also love, women and the world in general. It is one of those books you just get drawn into, and wish would never end.  Who is Loo’s ? I do wonder if he was partly based on Frisch. I think he is the same type of character I have seen in Frisch’s fiction. with his more classical view of the world and old-fashioned yearns for a world now gone. This is a book about the male view of marriage, about two men with very different ideas, and about love and how you move through the world. It is one of those deep philosophical novels that leave the reader thinking long after finishing the book. It is sure to feature high on my books of the year list; it is the best book I have read in the first half of this year. Have you read Markus Werner at all ?

 

 

 

 

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?

 

Library for the war wounded by Monika Helfer

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Library for the War Wounded by Monika Helfer

Austrian Fiction

Original title – Vati

Translator Gillian Davidson

Source – Library book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vati and Muti are names used for parents.

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

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

‘cuddle up?

In the present as she looks into the past

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

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 ?

The Cafe with no Name by Robert Seethaler

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The Cafe with no Name by Robert Seethaler

Austrian fiction

Original title – Das Café ohne Namen

Translator – Katy Derbyshire

Source – Personal copy

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

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

The first customer came in less than ten minutes later.

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

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

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

‘Not any more,’ said Simon.

‘What have you got? the man asked.

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

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

‘Not a lot.’

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

The first day of the cafe!

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

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

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

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

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

 

War Primer by Alexander Kluge

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War Primer by Alexander Kluge

German fiction

Original title – Kreigsfibel

Translator – Alexander Booth

Source – Personal copy

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

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

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

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

The echoes of previous conflicts

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

War Diary by Ingeborg Bachmann

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War diary by Ingeborg Bachmann

German memoir

Original title – Krieg Tagebuch

Translator -Mike Mitchell

Source – Personal copy

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

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

He was from Vienna and connect over there love of books

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

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

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

Jack letter shows how he feels rootless due to his past

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

Blue Night by Simone Buchholz

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Blue Night by Simone Buchholz

German crime fiction

Original title – Blaue Nacht

Translator – Racvhel Ward

Source – Library books

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

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

A kick in the belly, and you go down.

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

Then they whip the coshes out from under their jackets.

Three jackets, three coshes.

Left leg, right leg.

Left arm, right arm.

And six feet for twelve pairs of ribs.

Your very own many-headed demon.

Tailor-made to order.

Then out come the pliers.

Right index finger.

A clean crack.

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

One final kick to something broken.

Then they leave you lying there.

It took one minute, maybe two.

The opening lines the attack that lead to the unkown man

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

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

It’s got to stop.

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

Answering it would be good.

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

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

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

‘Yes, I think so?

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

‘I did, I say. ‘What time is it?

‘Half past five?

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

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

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

 

The Class Reunion by Franz Werfel

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The Class Reunion by Franz Werfel

Austrian fiction

Original title – Der Abituriententag

Translator Bernhard Rest

Source – Review copy

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

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

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

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

At his reunion

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

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

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

Weeks passed.

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

When talking about Adler at the reunion

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

 

Yellow Street by Veza Canetti

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Yellow Street by Veza Canetti

Austrian fiction

Original title  – Die gelbe Straße

Translator Ian Mitchell

Source – Personal copy

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

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

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

The opening story

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

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

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

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

Herr Vik made an impression on me

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

The 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 !!!