***REGION 26: Europe VIII

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***REGION 26: Europe VIII

1avaland
dec 25, 2010, 5:33 pm

If you have not read the information on the master thread regarding the intent of these regional threads, please do this first.

***26. Europe VIII: Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein

2rebeccanyc
dec 25, 2010, 10:08 pm

I've read a lot of books by German and Austrian authors, including Thomas Mann, Hans Fallada, Joesph Roth, and Stefan Zweig,and won't post reviews of most of them since they are all fairly well known. I will post a review of a less well known book that was published in the US this past year.

Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson 1947, translation 2010, German

This haunting novella, originally published in 1947 but only just translated into English, takes place in Nazi-occupied Holland. With allied bombers nightly flying in from the coast towards Germany, an ordinary Dutch couple, Wim and Marie, without much forethought, take in and hide a Jewish man, Nico. The novella jumps back and forth in time, starting with the evening Nico dies of a fever and the couple have to figure out what to do with the body, and then moving backwards to their life with their hidden guest. The "comedy," such as it is, comes from the tentative way Marie, especially, learns to live with the situation -- who to tell, who not to tell, what to do when the milkman comes, or the cleaning lady -- and her efforts to try to understand Nico. Needless to say, complications ensue after Wim and a doctor leave the body in a park. For me, the most interesting aspects of the book were the insight into the underground in Holland and, even more, the way Keilson is able to capture the claustrophobic feel of being cooped up in a blacked-out room.

3rebeccanyc
dec 26, 2010, 1:34 pm

And one more . . .

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss, 1911 (translation 2009), German

This book, received as part of my Archipelago Books subscription, is remarkable: equal parts compelling and horrifying. In it, Georg Letham tells the stories of the murder of his wife, his father's struggles on an Arctic expedition, and his own transport to a tropical penal colony and his medical work there in the midst of yellow fever epidemics. Throughout it all, Ernst Weiss's amazingly vivid writing made me visualize these disparate worlds, the people in them, and Letham's unending obsessiveness and capacity for self-delusion. Some of the material, in fact, was so vivid, that I found it a little hard to stomach, in particular extensive sections involving rats and some of the medical horrors in the penal colony Originally published in 1911, the book captures the expressionism and psychological interests of the era and really leaves me somewhat at a loss to describe what it is really "about" It was also slightly marred for me because the geography seemed a little confused and I found the narrator's occasional offhand racist comments more jarring than his other offensive behavior, perhaps because it seemed less an expression of his character and more a comment on prevalent attitudes at the time.

4avaland
dec 27, 2010, 3:27 pm



The Pigeon by Patrick Süskind (novella, German author, 1987, translation 1988)

An older middle-aged reclusive and fearful man lives an orderly, simple, contented life, by day ironically as a bank guard in Paris; that is, until an ordinary pigeon unhinges it all. And it is within the unhinging that a discovery is made. This is an enjoyable tale, slyly witty, and just about the right length. Just as you cannot take any more of this man's unhinging, something happens.

5kidzdoc
jan 6, 2011, 9:22 am

Several of us read short stories, novellas and novels by Stefan Zweig last year for lilisin's Author Theme Reads group. One of my favorite novellas was "Amok" in his collection Amok and Other Stories, which I reviewed here.

6nans
jan 6, 2011, 12:51 pm

Die Arbeit der Nacht (Night Work)
Thomas Glavinic
Austria

This book took me a good month to finish, not because it was bad, but because it was so good, and it freaked me out!

It's the story of Jonas who wakes one day to discover that there is no one around. Everyone has disappeared. Thus begins his adventure of wandering through an empty and lonely Vienna without traffic, people and rules.

Then strange things start to happen when he's sleeping, and it got really spooky from there. I'd really recommend this book, especially if you like psychological thrillers.

7alalba
Redigerat: mar 9, 2011, 1:44 pm

Germany

Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck

This is a short, but very rich, book written in a very poetic way, in which the writer seems strangely removed from the characters in the narrative. The story follows the lives of the inhabitants of a house built in a rural location in Germany. It develops over many years, from the period in which the land was a meadow, to the construction and then destruction of the house. The characters are very often not named, and they live through the world wars, the communist period of east Germany and the fall of the Berlin wall. Although only brief episodes of the lives of the inhabitants are narrated, it is easy to get attached to some of them. This is a very interesting book, in which the content and the writing style are well linked together .

8rebeccanyc
mar 21, 2011, 9:07 am

Irretrievable by Theodor Fontane Germany, originally published 1892, translated 1963 and reissued by NYRB in 2011

Although the blurb on the back of the NYRB edition that I read describes this book as the story of a married couple drifting apart, that is only part of the novel set in the second half of the 19th century in Schleswig-Holstein, the part of Germany that juts up into the Baltic and borders Denmark (and has, in fact, gone back and forth between them over the years). The bulk of it, which takes place mostly in Copenhagen, where the husband is temporarily serving as lord-in-waiting to an aging Danish princess, vividly depicts the frivolity and triviality of the aristocracy with nothing but time on their hands. Further, in my opinion, it cannot be said that the couple "drifts" apart; it seems more that after their differences become more apparent after years of marriage, the husband, weak-willed and self-indulgent, rationalizes his behavior based on the idea that his wife is "cold" to him.

Fontane, who was much admired by Thomas Mann, is a wonderful writer, whose dialogue and descriptions bring the characters, their psychology, and the natural and constructed environment to life. I was drawn into this novel, especially the parts that take place in the castle the couple built overlooking the sea, less so by the parts in the Danish court, although they were equally well written.

Touchstones not working this morning.

9Trifolia
jul 29, 2011, 2:57 pm

Germany: Het leven gaat verder (And life goes on) by Hans Keilson - 4 stars

A lot of books have been written about the second World War. Far less books have concentrated on the period before that war. In this book, we meet the middle-class Seldersen-family, who live in a small provincial town in Germany. The parents are shopkeepers and the son Albrecht is studying. Throughout the book we witness the fall of the family and of the whole German society, the economic crisis of the 1930's, people who lose their jobs, people who are not able to pay their debt, etc. We witness the strikes, the discontentment, the rebellion, but also the meekness, the despair and the clever tricks by resourceful people. Parallel to this is the story of Albrecht who wants to study and his friend Fritz who wants to work. But they both have a very hard time in realizing their dreams.
This is not an uplifting book, but it is relevant and beautiful, especially if you know it is written by Keilson in 1933. It was the last book by a jewish author that was published by Fischer Verlag and was banned a few months later. In 1936 Keilson migrated to the Netherlands.

10Trifolia
jul 29, 2011, 3:04 pm

Germany: De Middagvrouw (The Blind side of the Heart) by Julia Franck - 3 stars


Hm, now this is a tough one to review. Part of me liked this book, part of me thought it had too many flaws. I thought the theme was interesting and intriguing enough: shortly after the war a 7 year old boy is left by his mother Helene aka Alice on a train-station. What caused the mother to abandon her child this way. The rest of the book is a flash-back in which we get to to know Helene, her family, her background, her history which all lead up to abandoning the child. The author writes fluently in a rich and elaborate style. However, it did not convince me. I did feel sorry for Helene because she had a miserable childhood and youth with a madwoman for a mother and a lesbian older sister who couldn't keep her hands off her (and others in her presence), lost the love of her life and felt obliged to marry a man she didn't love which did not work out well. But Helene never "touched" me. I couldn't get a grip of her personality. All through the book she was so depressing, so distant although I'm sure the author did everything she could to make her feel like a victim. Other than that, I didn't like the shallowness of the other personalities: the mad mother, the intelligent boyfriend who loves art and philosophy, the loose aunt with her boyfriends, the sister and her doctor-girl-friend, the husband who changes his personality overnight. It was all a bit cliché and gimmicky and for some strange reason, despite all the words, none of the characters came to life for me. I was bothered with all the loose ends also. The author started something but didn't pick it up later to finish it off. And on a less important note, I thought it was not necessary to elaborate on the sex-experience the way she did. But then, sex sells.
It also struck me that this book contains absolutely no humour, which is rare. I find that almost every book, however serious and heart-breaking, often contains humour or a light tone to make it a bit more bearable. This one didn't.
So, all in all, the book did not live up to my expectations. I had hoped after the first chapter, that I would be able to understand Helene's motives, but I just thought what a self-centered, depressing woman she was. Maybe if I had read the book this way (which I'm sure I was not meant to do), I would have enjoyed it more.
For some reason, I compare the Helene-character to Jane Eyre. There are similarities: both woman have their difficulties when growing up and have to make hard choices but at least Jane Eyre (who has far less choices IMO), makes the best of it while Helene is just a depressive woman who abandons her innocent little boy. No way, Jane Eyre would have done this.
So, I don't really recommend this book, although I'm sure there are plenty of people who did love the book and weren't taken aback by what I see as flaws.

11Trifolia
jul 29, 2011, 3:13 pm

Germany: De Steppewolf (Steppenwolf) by Herman Hesse - 4 stars

This book tells the story of a man who struggles with his personality and finds himself out of tune with the world he lives in. I really liked it although it's not my usual cup or tea. I understand this book, written in 1927, is a bit of a cult-book, often read by troubled teenagers either by choice or because they had modern lit-teachers and I can see why. However, I suspect this book cannot be appreciated unless you can relate to the middle-aged main character, i.e. if you have experienced life a while longer than the teenage-years. I think this is necessary to really understand the depth and meaning of the book. Furthermore, I think this book is a waste if you've never felt slightly depressed, melancholic or not in tune with the world, but then, who hasn't?
So, I think it's a waste on young adults, but otherwise, a book to really get you thinking. Apart from that, I also thought it excellently conveyed the atmosphere of the 1920's, in a very subtle way.

12rebeccanyc
jul 29, 2011, 3:40 pm

Very interesting about Steppenwolf; I read it as a melancholy teenager some 40 years ago and it never occurred to me until reading your review to consider reading it again. Now if I could only find it on the shelves . . . although it seems from a check of LT that I haven't kept it in my library.

13Trifolia
jul 29, 2011, 3:47 pm

# 12 - Fortunately I did not read the book as a teenager as I'm sure I wouldn't have liked it then. I'd be very interested to hear what you think of it if you decide to read it again and if you'd think differently about it.

14rebeccanyc
jul 29, 2011, 10:03 pm

Well, apparently I'm going to have to buy a new copy, although I can completely visualize my old copy and can't imagine why I didn't keep it!

15Trifolia
nov 18, 2011, 1:34 pm

Austria: De dag dat ze Jakob kwamen halen (Einer) by Norbert Gstrein


Jacob grows up in a small Austrian mountain-village where everyone lives off tourism, but as he doesn't seem to fit in, he starts to behave and be treated as a harmless lone-wolf, until eventually something happens.
This was an impressive book all throughout its 120-something pages. The story circles round the youth and memories surrounding Jacob and is told by his brother. We are left in the dark about what's really happened but it's obvious Jacob is different from the other villagers who earn their money with tourism. Jacob is not cut out for this kind of life and gradually becomes more isolated. The story made me think about the predestination of one's own life. About what it's like if you're born in a society that you don't feel comfortable in and if you don't have a chance to break away or if people continue to see you as "one of them" although you don't feel related to "them".
This definitely is a heavy yet subtle and thoughtful book that might not be appreciated by everyone, but is very rewarding if you're willing to take your time and give it some thought.

16Trifolia
Redigerat: nov 19, 2011, 1:25 pm

Switzerland: Peter Camenzind by Hermann Hesse


I have read Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse earlier this year and I liked his style, so when I stumbled on this one when looking for a book published in 1904 to match my Reading-Through-Time-Challenge, I didn't hesitate.
This is a classical Bildungsroman about Peter Camenzind who grows up in a remote Swiss village, tries to find a purpose in life, gets lost in culture, love and drink but eventually returns home because he realizes it's the best place to be.
I liked this book for more than one reason. The beautiful, elegant prose is one of them. His ode to nature is simple and beautiful, though maybe a bit corny and old-fashioned at times. I probably liked it even better because it brought back many happy memories of my travels to Switzerland and I wonder if it's a coincidence that the village he refers to as "Nimikon" very much reminded me of Sisikon.
I thought this was a soothing, accessible read. I'd recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind a bit of old-fashioned, Walden-like prose.

17Trifolia
nov 22, 2011, 2:11 pm

120. Wat nu, kleine man? (Little Man, What Now?) by Hans Fallada- 3 stars


The story it very simple: the young newly-weds Johannes and Emma try to survive during the economic depression in Germany in the 1930s, but things go from bad to worse
Fallada uses a very simple style which is a good way to convey the mentality and actions of the somewhat naive couple. The story lacks highlights, a plot, something that really keeps it going. Little happens, people cross their paths, events take place but overall, there's this eerie sense of powerlessness.
For me it was just a bit too simple. Earlier this year I read Das Leben geht weiter by Hans Keilson that was written one year later, in 1933 and dealt with more or less the same theme and issues and I must admit that I prefer Keilson's book. That's probably because Fallada's characters are somewhat emblematic, while Keilson has really given his characters depth and set them off. I guess it's a matter of taste. On the whole, I thought this was a good book which I mildly recommend. I will read Fallada's other book though because I'm curious to see how he evolved from 1932 to 1947.

18rebeccanyc
Redigerat: dec 30, 2011, 3:51 pm

AUSTRIA Written in the 1930s.
Three Novellas by Joseph Roth
The Leviathan by Joseph Roth

Of the three novellas, almost long short stories, in this collection, the second, "The Bust of the Emperor," treads the most familiar Joseph Roth territory: the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the change in borders, the rise of "nationalities," and the longing for what is lost. Both of the other venture into less familiar ground: "Fallmereyer the Stationmaster," while providing a vivid portrait of the far reaches of the empire, also shows a man obsessed by and transformed by love, while "The Legend of the Holy Drinker," my favorite of the three, portrays a poverty-stricken drunkard who, enobled by kindness, transforms himself, at least for a while. It is an unusual sign of hope in Roth's work, and was one of the last things he wrote before essentially dying of alcoholism himself.

But it was a stand-alone novella, "The Leviathan," which really grabbed me. In it, Roth makes the world of the protagonist, Nissen Piczenik, a Jewish coral dealer in a small town in eastern Europe, come alive; his descriptions of the corals, and Nissen's thoughts and feelings about them, are stunning, and so is the story of Niseen's temptation by his desire to see the sea, which leads to many other temptations and to his ultimate downfall. The writing is beautiful, and I couldn't put this book down.

19rocketjk
jan 25, 2012, 3:03 pm

Switzerland
I finished and reviewed the wonderful, insightful I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch.

20rebeccanyc
Redigerat: feb 7, 2012, 8:39 am

Austria Originally published 1966, translation 2011
An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori

Czernopol is really Czernowitz, a town at the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire that was famed as a crossroads where Romanians, Germans, Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and Jews mixed and lived in relative harmony until it became part of Romania after the first world war and gradually began coming apart under the stresses of the interwar period. (It is now Chernivtsi, in Ukraine.) It is during this interwar period that this novel takes place, told by a boy/young man, writing mainly as "we" to represent all the children his family, but written as an older man looking back at those vanished years.

The ermine in the title is Major Tildy, a one-time hussar in the Austro-Hungarian army now attached to the Romanian army in Czernopol. The story begins with his entrance into the town on horseback, completely enthralling the children who look upon him as the perfect romantic knight and become fascinated with him and his family. including his wife who is one of two daughters (one by his wife, one by his mistress) of the mysterious richest man in town. He swiftly gets into serious trouble, challenging several people including, ultimately, his superior officer, to duels to defend the long-lost honor of his sister-in-law, and winds up in the local insane asylum for most of the book, until his dramatic reappearance at the end.

Thus, the novel becomes an examination of the character and characters of Czernopol, and von Rezzori's brilliant and witty writing introduces the readers to people as varied as the gleefully gossipy old widow who looks after Major Tildy's wife, who has become a drug addict; the urbane and sophisticated prefect of the town who woos one of the children's aunts and who eventually is instrumental in getting them enrolled in a school run by the delightfully freewheeling Madame Antonovitch; a drunken professor and his massively and happily unfaithful wife, the aforementioned sister-in-law; a classmate who vividly mimics his hard-working father, a storekeeper, and his man-about-town older brother; a resident of the insane asylum who may or may not be writing lovely German poems; and too many more to mention. Von Rezzori interweaves their stories with the growing awareness of the children, and occasionally of the young man individually, of the realities of life and what is going on around them.

Into this world of tradition and controlled chaos, wit and cynicism, comes a shadow, the beginnings of the Nazi era. But even before the swastika scrawlers slink into the book, there have been hints of antisemitism. And the antisemitism portrayed in this book is varied. Not only is it the vile, overt antisemitism of Feuer, a local German, and some of the newspapers, that leads ultimately to a minipogrom, but it is also the everyday kind, which even "respectable" people breathe in with the air, discussing whether people they know are really Jews, viewing them stereotypically as peddlers and cheaters, and creating an environment in which a Jewish child knows that she would not be welcome in the narrator's family's house. But there is still a third kind of antisemitism, expressed by the narrator (and perhaps by the author who, disturbingly, was a radio announcer in Berlin during the second world war, surely a job that must have required the permission of the Nazis, if not party membership), and that is the unconscious, and almost admiring, kind, in which the narrator speaks of "the preformed characteristics of an ancient race" and reports that they discovered (his italics) "that people are sometimes also Jews" not that "Jews are also people". Perhaps this is the best that could be hoped for from someone of his time and place.

In the end, this is a story of a lost and largely beautiful world that coincides with the narrator's loss of childhood and the world's shock at the horrors of the Nazi era, still yet to come. As the narrator looks back, he seems to agree with the prefect, Herr Tarangolian, that it is better to be "witty" than "just." This is an extremely witty, sometimes funny, beautifully characterized, and deeply insightful novel, both psychologically and sociologically, and yet it rarely loses its love, apparently typical of Czernopol, of a joke. And what of Major Tildy, that the representative of the past, of the rigor and honor of the Austro-Hungarian army? Released from the insane asylum, he reaches a tragic and almost farcial end.

21noveltea
feb 26, 2012, 8:32 pm

(East) Germany: The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by Her Minstrel Laura by Irmtraud Morgner
Originally published in 1974, translation by Jeanette Clausen 2000

Beatrice de Dia, Provençal noblewoman and trobadora, is awakened from eight centuries of enchanted sleep by a highway construction project in 1968. Soon disenchanted with modern France, a land so unenlightened that it offers no career opportunities for a female troubadour, she makes her way to the GDR (East Germany), which she believes (and will never stop believing) is a socialist paradise for women. In (East) Berlin, she meets Laura Salman, a trolley driver and single mother who reluctantly agrees to fill the role of Beatrice's "minstrel." In addition to introducing a little magic into Laura's life, in the form of "the Beautiful Melusine," a wish-granting half-woman/half-dragon, Beatrice provides surprisingly reliable childcare. Nevertheless, before long Laura decides to get rid of the trobadora for a while, by sending her on a quest to capture a unicorn.

This vastly entertaining "montage novel" includes, among many other things, scientific reports, quite a few chunks of a previously suppressed Morgner novel, and poetry in Morse code. This is (among many other things) a feminist novel that is truly important and truly hilarious.

A glossary in this edition explains many of the acronyms, terms, dates and names unlikely to be familiar to an English-language audience. I have no doubt a great many other references went over my head, and I sometimes found myself wondering, in sections that were political/patriotic, if Morgner was being satirical, or sincere, or both.

While reading, I kept thinking, "This book is amazing! I can't believe I never heard of it, or of Irmtraud Morgner!" Thus my first LibraryThing review: my tiny way of making sure other people hear about this amazing book and writer.

22labfs39
jun 21, 2012, 10:19 pm

Although the author was born in Romania, she is an ethnic German and lives in GERMANY now, so I am double posting to both countries.



35. The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller, translated from the German by Philip Boehm

I was particularly eager to read this novel because I've never read anything by Herta Müller, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. The author was born and raised in Romania, but left for Germany to escape the harassment and threats of Ceauşescu's secret police. Although Müller never experienced the Soviet labor camps to which many ethnic German Romanians were sent after World War II, her mother did. In addition to family history, Müller extensively interviewed the poet Oskar Pastior, a former deportee, in what was to be a collaboration. Unfortunately, Pastior passed away, and Müller ended up writing the book alone. This intimate knowledge about the camps lends an authenticity to the novel, which to me is essential when writing survivor literature and this type of fictitious, but personal narrative.

Leo Ausberg is seventeen, bored with small town life, and exploring his first sexual encounters when he receives an order that he is to be deported to a Soviet labor camp for five years to help with the rebuilding of Russia after Stalingrad. Others from his town have been "called up" as well, and Leo is secretly excited at the thought of traveling and leaving his provincial town and family for a while. With a gramophone case as a suitcase, Leo boards a cattle car for the East with a light heart.

The next five years in the coke-processing plant disabuse Leo of his foolish optimism and teach him many things: 1 shovel load=1 gram of bread, to let slip any hint of his homosexuality would mean death, and the cruel intimacy of the hunger angel. The long hours, the cold and heat, the abuse, and the lice are nothing to the tortures of the hunger angel. He encompasses the mind and subsumes the will. He promises to come back, but never leaves. Everyone in the camps has a hunger angel, and they dictate everything in the camps, from hunger-fur to morality. Müller focuses on this image as compulsively as the camp inmate thinks of food, and the reader is drawn into the mood claustrophobic obsession.

Although the beginning and end of the story are plot focused, many of the middle chapters most closely resemble essays. As Leo (and Müller) reflect on the ways in which camp life impact the way the mind functions, the plot falls to the side. These short pieces each deal with an element of camp life: shoveling, chemicals, boredom, a cuckoo clock, retribution of a bread thief. Although they are all tied together through Leo, I found that my reading slowed a little too much as I read one or two chapter essays and then stopped, with little need to carry on for plot's sake. As I neared the end of the book and the narrative became more plot focused, I finished quite quickly.

The Hunger Angel opened my eyes to the post-war plight of the Romanian ethnic Germans, about whom I knew little. I thought it was mostly German POWs who were sent to the camps. In addition, I enjoyed the language of the text , which is poetic, full of imagery, and poignant without being pitying. I look forward to reading more of Müller's work and have added The Land of Green Plums to my list.

23labfs39
jun 21, 2012, 10:23 pm

>9 Trifolia: Wonderful reading, Monica. And I'm delighted to report that Life Goes On by Hans Keilson is supposed to be released October 30th in the US. Yay!

24rebeccanyc
Redigerat: maj 15, 2013, 12:48 pm

Germany

Transit by Anna Seghers



Anyone who has seen the movie Casablanca, even if not as many times as I have, will remember the opening frames in which a route is traced across Europe from Paris to Marseille and from there to Oran and then Casablanca, where they "wait . . . and wait" for their exit visas. But before the refugees from Nazi Europe waited in Casablanca, or elsewhere, they waited in Marseille, the only port in France remaining in French hands. And it is Marseille in 1940/41 which is at the center of this stunning novel, written soon after Seghers herself fled from Marseille to Martinique (on the same ship as Claude Levi-Strauss, Victor Serge, and Andre Breton, all traveling on visas arranged by Varian Fry) and then to Mexico. It was published in 1944 in English and Spanish before being published in German, but I read the new English translation published by NYRB.

This is a book that is fascinating on multiple levels. At the most basic, it is a portrait of a wintry Marseille and of the refugees who flooded there after the fall of Paris and much of France, their desperation to get on the "last ship," and the insanely Catch 22 nature of the visa process, in which you couldn't get an exit visa if you didn't have a transit visa (allowing you to travel through countries on the way to your final destination), and you also had to have all sorts of other papers including ones that allowed you to stay in Marseille, which you couldn't get unless you had other papers proving that you planned to leave. Consulates open and close, many consular officials don't care about scheduling visa appointments before the ship someone has booked passage on is to leave, some people exert influence through money and other means, some sailors figure out ways to make money by including refugees on cargo ships, and more. Refugees live in hotels or rooming houses, exploited by landlords and landladies, hang out in cafes (despite the alcohol-free days), and gossip, gossip, gossip -- about visas and ships and money.

At the same time, this is something of a thriller. The narrator, known as Seidler because of the papers he obtained, a German who escaped from a concentration camp and fled to Paris, and then fled from Paris to Marseille, has wound up with the manuscript of and letters to a German writer named Weidel and thus finds himself mistaken for Weidel by various consular officials when he is trying to arrange to get the materials to Weidel's wife. He is not sure he wants to leave, although he isn't supposed to stay in Marseille unless he is going to, as he has friends in Marseille and, then, becomes obsessed with a woman who comes into many of the cafes and restaurants he frequents, looking frantically at all the tables as if she is searching for someone she never finds. The woman turns out to be the lover of a doctor who is treating the son of Seidler's friends. Then the reader, a moment before Seidler, realizes who the woman is. Plot complications develop. Will they escape together or separately? Will they understand the connection between Seidler and Weidel? What is Seidler really up to?

And the novel is also a meditation on the nature of identity, the difficulties of exile, the ancient history of Marseille as a port and point of departure for many cultures, and human motivations for good or for evil. Along the way, Seghers, who is a terrific writer, introduces a variety of fascinating secondary characters. While I enjoyed the plot, I think I was more intrigued by Seghers' portrait of the city, the refugees, and their frantic activities, as well as by the narrator's thoughts about Marseille and his life there. There is an elegiac, sorrowful feel to the book about this particular time and place, but it also speaks to the life and plight of refugees in all times and places.

Some examples of Seghers' prose.

"Then my mood changed. Why? Who knows what causes these mood changes. Suddenly I no longer thought all the chitchat was disgusting; it seemed fascinating now. It was the age-old harbor gossip, as ancient as the Old Port itself and even older. Wonderful, ancient harbor twaddle that's existed as long as there's been a Mediterranean Sea, Phoenician chitchat, Cretan and Greek gossip, and that of the Romans. There was never a shortage of gossips who were anxious about their berths aboard a ship and about their money, or who were fleeing from all the real and imagined horrors of the world. Mothers who had lost their children, children who had lost their mothers. The remnants of crushed armies, escaped slaves, human hordes who had been chased from all the countries of the earth, and having at last reached the sea, boarded ships to discover new lands from which they would again be driven; forever running from one death toward another." p. 78

"Aren't you thoroughly fed up with such thrilling stories? Aren't you sick of all these suspenseful tales about people surviving mortal danger by a hair, about breathtaking escapes? Me, I'm sick and tired of them. If something still thrills me today, then maybe it's an old worker's yarn about how many feet of wire he's drawn in the course of his long life and what tools he used, or the glow of the lamplight by which a few children are doing their homework." p. 4

25Polaris-
maj 15, 2013, 5:55 pm

Wow, great review Rebecca! This sounds like my kind of book. On to the wishlist it goes!

26rocketjk
Redigerat: feb 12, 2014, 4:35 pm

Germany

I finished The Good German by Joseph Kanon. A very lucid picture, I thought, if what Berlin was like immediately after the end of World War Two, plus a good mystery thriller, as well. I posted a more in-depth review on the book's work-page for anyone interested.

27labfs39
feb 12, 2014, 4:28 pm



18. Life Goes On by Hans Keilson, translated from the German by Damion Searls

Written when the author was only twenty-three and published in 1933, Life Goes On is an autobiographical novel that is in part a depiction of Keilson's father and in part a commentary on the post-WWI years and the generation that grew up during 1920's Germany.

Seldersen the shopkeeper had never in his life wanted anything to do with people whose heads seemed to be bursting with big, boundless ideas. What he needed was right there next to him, in arm's reach at all times; his type is absorbed in everyday life, and he always kept his air of calm mastery, not without a certain restraint and reserve. He was a whole man, and behind him stood a whole age. He was past fifty by that time and his life up until then had been nothing but one long struggle... He had survived the war on the front lines unharmed, even if those four years seemed like ten... His wife had run the business during those four years, while raising two children. Despite how hard she tried, Herr Seldersen had found nothing but ruins when he came back: shelves empty, customers gone, a distressing outlook all in all...

He lost all his money in the inflation and this time had to struggle hard to barely get back on his feet... But he made enough to get by and was satisfied. So times were tough and there were signs of even more serious problems ahead—you just had to be a man and shoulder whatever burden there was. But there was no getting around old age.


Albrecht is still a boy in school when the novel opens, and his ideas about his country, manhood, and intellectual life are in development. He watches, almost as a disinterested third party, as his father struggles to keep the store going in a worsening economic climate and faces the end of his dreams of an easy retirement. As Albrecht gets older, he starts to make his own decisions about the right way to face the inflation, labor unrest, and despair that grows steadily around him and pulls his generation into its grip.

This is not a cheerful book, and from the first page, you know things are only going to get worse. But no one knew how much worse, not even the author. The Nazis banned his book in 1934 and later forced him to emigrate. He ended up in the Netherlands, joined the Dutch Resistance, and became a Dutch citizen. He would spend his life helping treat children traumatized by war. His parents, the shopkeepers immortalized in this debut novel, were murdered at Auschwitz. Keilson would go on to write two more critically acclaimed novels, The Death of the Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key, but at the age of 100, Keilson approached The New York Times and said he would love to see his first novel reissued and translated. I would recommend this novel for those interested in Keilson's life and a somewhat dry, but true depiction of life in interwar Germany.

28rocketjk
Redigerat: sep 19, 2017, 3:04 pm

Austria

I just finished Reigen, The Affairs of Anatol and Other Plays, a Modern Library edition of a collection of plays by Arthur Schnitzler. Schnitzler was an important Austrian playwright in the late 19- and early 20th centuries. He wrote frankly about sexual matters and the furor over the content of his plays was evidently fueled by the fact that he was Jewish. Schnitzler died in 1931, but that didn't stop Hitler from having his books thrown onto the bonfires en masse during the Nazi's book burning heyday. The plays in this collection include Schnitzler's most famous, "Reigen," in which ten pairs of characters converse just before and after making love (note: not during), leading and ending with a prostitute. This play has been made into movies several times with the title La Ronde.

According to the Wikipedia entry on Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud, in a letter to Schnitzler, confessed "I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition – though actually as a result of sensitive introspection – everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons."

At any rate, these plays (there are four in the collection) were fun to read, for their historical value as much as for the fun of the plays themselves. Three of the plays are on Schnitzler's main theme, sexual mores, (or, as he put it according to Wikipedia, "I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?"). The final play in the collection takes place in a Paris cafe during the French Revolution. I have to admit I had never heard of Schnitzler, and probably never would have, were it not for my modest Modern Library collection. A couple of years back I picked up at a garage sale a box of early ML volumes to add to that collection, and a month or so ago I decided to actually read one, picking Schnitzler off the stack more or less at random. The fact that my volume is a Modern Library first edition (alas, no dust jacket), published and printed in 1933, also added to the reading experience.

Although the first three plays could really take place almost anywhere in Europe, and the fourth takes place in Revolution-era France, Schnitzler's importance as an Austrian playwright makes this, I feel, authentically enough a reading visit to Austria.

29rebeccanyc
maj 10, 2014, 11:51 am

GERMANY
Original publication dates 1896-1912
This translation 1998

Death in Venice and Other Tales by Thomas Mann



In this collection of stories, and two novellas, by Mann, the mood is almost uniformly grim, sometimes even horrifying, and often claustrophobic. Most of the stories deal with people who are in some way misfits, at time physically stunted, at times psychologically stunted, and of course at times both, and the ways they are tormented by others and by their own minds. For example, in the stunningly depressing "Little Herr Friedemann" (a story that led me to buy this book because it was recommended by a friend), the protagonist winds up deformed after he is dropped on his head as an infant. As the story progresses, he falls in love with a beautiful woman who toys with him by encouraging him to play the violin for her, leading to a shocking, but foreshadowed, conclusion. In "Little Lizzy," a woman and her lover torment her fat and hated husband by making him sing wearing women's clothes at a community party they are sponsoring. The unpleasantness just doesn't stop in these stories.

Like these two stories, many of the tales in this collection involve music. In "Tristan," which takes place at a sanatorium (giving some idea of where Mann might got with The Magic Mountain), a patient falls in love with a new patient, schemes to be able to be with her, and convinces her to play the piano (something the doctors have forbidden her to do). As she plays music stacked on the piano, she comes upon the music for Wagner's Tristan, specifically a piece called the Liebstod (as a non-opera lover, I had to resort to Google) -- their emotions build to a climax, and tragedy results. In "The Blood of the Walsungs," a thoroughly creepy and borderline anti-Semitic story, a twin brother and sister, named after the twins in Die Walküre (another trip to Google), and who treat each other very inappropriately for a brother and sister, go to a performance of that opera just before she is to get married. And more.

Other tales, including the two novellas, "Tonio Kröger" and "Death in Venice," focus on writers, and the distance they feel from ordinary people. In both of these novellas, the protagonists feel compelled to take journeys away from the places they live and work, seeking some comfort they are unable to find at home. In "Death in Venice," the writer, who has always prided himself on his austerity and self-control, finds himself enraptured by a young boy and tormented by complex and unbidden feelings he has never experienced before, or has always repressed. He is both confused and entranced. There is a lot of philosophy in this novella, and I don't think I understood it all.

I found it interesting that Mann transformed some of his personal history in some of these stories; in "Tonio Kröger," Tonio's mother came from Italy, and much is made of this mixture in his parentage, while Mann's mother was half Brazilian. The contrast between the north and the south, in atmosphere and personality, is another theme of some of these stories.

I had never read any of Mann's shorter works before I picked up this book, and I have to say I much prefer his longer works. Although these tales were intense, they didn't engage me as much as Buddenbrooks, Joseph and His Brothers, and The Magic Mountain did. They seemed claustrophobic and, even in the claustrophobic atmosphere of The Magic Mountain, Mann has more room for expansiveness and complexity. I'm glad I read his novels first, because reading this collection would not have inspired me to read more Mann.

30rebeccanyc
okt 13, 2014, 11:02 am

AUSTRIA

Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke
Originally published 1972; English translation 1974.



Peter Handke is now more famous, or notorious, for his very vocal support for Slobodan Milosevic, but when he wrote this book in 1972, at the age of 30, that was all in the future. Without telling too much of the "plot," this novel follows the unnamed narrator, who is also an Austrian who turns 30 in the course of the story, as he either seeks his ex-wife or flees he (she may be murderous), traveling across the United States from Providence to New York to Philadelphia and then to Tucson, the Pacific Northwest, and finally Los Angeles. So this book is many things: a road trip, a not very suspenseful suspense story, and a European 'perspective on the late 60s US (some of which, even when expressed by American characters, seems a tad stereotypical). But what it is primarily is a largely claustrophobic look inside the mind of the very self-obsessed narrator, who itemizes his every thought and feeling, paying little attention to the people with whom he interacts. And maybe, just maybe, he is a little psychologically disturbed (I mean beyond this self-obsession). Just to give the flavor of some of his endless musings:

"As I sat motionless, something began to move back and forth in my head in a rhythm resembling that of my wanderings about New York that day. Once it stopped, then for a long time it ran straight ahead, then it zigzagged, then it circled awhile and subsided. It was neither an image nor a sound, only a rhythm that now or then pretended to be one or the other. It was only then that I saw inside me the city that up until then I had almost overlooked." p. 36

Literary, artistic, film, 60s rock, and other popular culture references abound in this book: in the beginning the narrator is reading The Great Gatsby and feels that Gatsby is enabling him to transform himself. He also reads a German book, Green Heinrich, which tells the tale of a German boy/young man living in the country in earlier times, including his romantic difficulties and physical conflicts. In the course of the novel, he attends various films, from Tarzan to Young Lincoln and in the end even meets director John Ford (who, in contrast to the narrator, expressly advocates engagement with other human beings). (Handke wrote scripts for films as well as novels.)

As the book progresses, the reader gets a hint of unpleasant aspects of the narrator's childhood that could have contributed to his lack of interest in the other people in the novel. To some extent, the narrator is self-aware. He knows, for example, that he doesn't really experience a new experience, but "checks it off."

I didn't warm to this novel as I was reading it. I found the narrator almost insufferable, his travels only mildly interesting, his interactions with other people odd (one wonders why they put up with him). And yet . . . a day after I finished it, I find I'm still thinking about it. Short novel, long aftereffect?

31kidzdoc
okt 23, 2014, 9:19 am

GERMANY

The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke



I don't know what would have happened if we'd been able to eat at six o'clock as usual. It's astonishing how people react when the routine is disturbed, a tiny delay to the normal schedule and at once everything is different.

This novella, which was originally published in 1990 and not translated into English until last year, is set in a home in West Berlin prior to the country's reunification. An unnamed woman and her teenaged son and daughter have prepared a feast of moules-frites (mussels with chips) for the head of the household, who promises to bring good news of a promotion to the top level of the company he works for. He does not appear at six o'clock, which is surprising given his usual promptness and rigidity, and instead of eating the sumptuous meal the three of them wait anxiously for his arrival. As time passes and as they become inebriated with drink they speak openly and critically about him, and slowly, in the manner of peeling away the layers of an onion, the man's tyrannical and monstrous behavior towards each of them is revealed.

This story of a dysfunctional family is enriched with symbolism, presumably of German society in the 1980s, which includes the gruesome description of the death throes of the mussels as they are boiled alive, and their increasingly distasteful appearance as they sit, uneaten, for hours afterward. The Mussel Feast is a striking and powerful work, and one which undoubtedly would reveal more on subsequent readings.

32rebeccanyc
nov 9, 2014, 6:50 pm

GERMANY

Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man by Thomas Mann
Originally published 1954



This is Mann's last novel, left unfinished at his death. (More on that later.) Both comic (in a way I haven't seen in his other novels) and serious, this tells the tale of Felix Krull in his own voice, for he is the narrator, at times delightful, at times borderline insufferable. Starting with his childhood, with a godfather who liked to dress him up in various costumes, Felix delighted in trying on different personalities and generally deceiving people (for example, pretending to be sick to avoid school and really getting into the part). His father was the proprietor of a company that made very inferior champagne and, despite the fact that the company was on shaky financial ground, his parents frequently threw wild, drunken parties; that is, until the day when the creditors came to take away all their furniture and their house and the father killed himself.

Thus starts a new life for Felix, his mother, and his sister, one of poverty. His godfather comes to the rescue with plans for each of them; Felix is to go work in a hotel in Paris but first he must find a way to avoid his required military service. This is the first time the reader sees Felix's persistence and dedication, as well as his imagination. Before he ultimately fools the military recruiters, he spends evenings wandering through the streets of the better part of Frankfurt, learning all the details of the highest quality of jewelry, clothes, food, and much more. And then off to Paris he goes, with a border stop where at customs the jewelry case of a lady standing in front of him somehow winds up in his suitcase. He starts out as an elevator operator, but is so charming that he soon is promoted to a waiter. Various romantic and criminal activities take place in the course of this sojourn at the hotel, and the reader sees how Felix throws himself into not just into doing his job and getting ahead but also has a secret stash of money and elegant clothing that he keeps in a rented apartment (the hotel workers live in dorms within the hotel) so that he can go out with a completely different persona on his days off.

It is while Felix is out in these upper class surroundings that he finds the opportunity to masquerade as the Marquis de Venosta, leave his job, and go on an around-the-world tour that the Marquis's parents are forcing the real Marquis to go on so he will forget the dance hall woman he is love with. The first stop in the Marquis's travels is Lisbon, from where he will take a ship to South America; on the train, Felix, traveling as the Marquis, meets a professor who introduces him first to natural history, evolution, and the geological history of the planet and then to his utterly charming wife and daughter. Complications develop.

So this is the plot. Clearly, Mann is exploring issues of identity, deception, and class; he also has Felix obsessed with the idea of "doubles" -- early on, a sister and brother, later the Portuguese wife and daughter, and of course himself and the Marquis. How this would have evolved if Mann had finished the book is an open question. Felix loves life and has a high self-regard not just for his vaunted good looks but also for his ability to conquer all obstacles and adapt to any situation. He is by and large a fun character.

It is clear from the book that Mann intended it to be much longer, for Felix refers to other people he pretended to be, but the book never extends past Lisbon and his role as the Marquis. And, delightful as much of this book is, it is too long in spots; I like to think that if Mann had lived he would not just have extended Felix's tale but would also have returned to edit some of the places where the narrative drags.

As a note on the translation, I found several peculiarities. While early on the translator refers to the Gare du Nord in Paris as "North Station" and translates a French person's name as "Bob," he also leaves paragraphs in French (and one in Italian) (obviously where Mann wrote in those languages instead of German) without a footnoted translation. I can read French (and can guess at Italian), but how could the translator and the publisher have assumed that all readers can?

33rebeccanyc
nov 27, 2014, 8:14 am

GERMANY
Originally published 2011; English translation 2013.

In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge



This novel started slowly for me, but gradually it lured me in and by the end I could hardly put it down. It tells the tale of four generations of a family in East Germany (the GDR) over 50 years from 1952 to 2001, but it does so by jumping back and forth in time, with different chapters set at different times and with each chapter told from the point of view of different characters.

The oldest members of the family are Charlotte and Wilhelm, who grew up in the pre-World War II era, who were involved in some way in Communist politics, and who fled?/were sent? to Mexico for a time. Charlotte is the mother of Kurt and his missing brother Werner. Kurt was in the Soviet Union for a time and was imprisoned in the Gulag in the Urals; when his sentence was changed to exile there, he met and married Irina, and eventually they were able to return to the GDR. Years later, they brought Irina's mother back from Slava in the Urals to live with them. Their son is Alexander/Sasha, who grows up, is drafted, marries, has a son of his own, Markus, but has trouble settling down or figuring out what he wants from life. Through these characters, the reader sees many of the changes taking place in the GDR, from Charlotte, who was raised by her mother to take the water off the stove just before the kettle started to whistle to save gas to Markus who smokes pot and takes Ecstasy.

The story starts in 2001, as Sasha, who has just learned he has inoperable cancer, goes to help take care of his now widowed father, Kurt, who has some kind of dementia. Then it switches to 1952, and Charlotte's perspective on her and Wilhelm's time in in Mexico, and then to the first of many chapters that take place on October 1, 1989, just before the fall of the Wall, when Wilhelm's 90th birthday is being celebrated. Over the course of the book, the reader sees this event from the point of view of many of the characters. Another recurring time is 2001 (just after the attacks on the World Trade Center), when Kurt travels to Mexico to retrace some of his grandmother's and Wilhelm's history and to find himself; all these chapters are told from Kurt's perspective.

There are many fascinating vignettes in this novel; perhaps my favorite was the story of how Irina got the apricots for the stuffing for her 1976 Christmas goose through a lengthy series of black market trades. Much of what happens in this novel is domestic rather than political; in fact, there is a focus on cooking and recipes at times, as well as on aging and challenging family relationships, and buried (or not so buried) resentments and hostilities. Nothing very dramatic happens. Eventually some secrets are revealed and some mysteries solved, but much remains opaque at the end, like real life. The reader becomes wrapped up in the story of this family and their times.

As a note, I found this book on display in one of my favorite bookstores (which is scheduled to close at the end of the year) and would probably have passed it over except for this quarter's Reading Globally theme read on postwar German writing. I'm glad I found it.

34rocketjk
Redigerat: nov 14, 2015, 3:38 pm

Although Philip Kerr is a British writer, his Bernie Gunter private detective series provides a vivid noirish picture of Germany before, during and after World War II. I've just finished the fourth entry in this series, The One from the Other, set in 1949. Irritation with the American occupiers and, more to the point, menace from Nazi war criminals bent on escaping their crimes give Bernie all he can handle. Lots of atmosphere and history and a very enjoyable reading experience, all in all.

35thorold
apr 7, 2016, 6:19 am

Cross-posted from my CR thread:

Holzfällen: eine Erregung (1984; Woodcutters, an irritation, 1985) by Thomas Bernhard (Austria, 1931-1989)



Thomas Bernhard came from a background that belies the conservative Austrian stereotype - a teenaged single mother and anarchist grandparents who never bothered to marry - and he seems to have devoted his life to being awkward, mocking Austria and its traditions and cultural institutions at every opportunity. If you had offered him a Mozartkugel, he would have been looking for a way to fire it at the minister of culture. But he's indisputably one of the greatest modern writers in German: despite his notoriously ungrateful acceptance speeches (on one occasion he managed to provoke a minister to punch him during an awards ceremony), it was probably only his early death that saved him from the Nobel.

The action of Holzfällen can be summed up in a single paragraph - and that's exactly what Bernhard does, but the paragraph in question is 320 pages long. The narrator has been invited to an "artistic supper party" in the rather grand Gentzgasse apartment of some old acquaintances, the Auersbergers (a composer and a singer), whom he happened to bump into in the street after having been away from Vienna for a long time. The guest of honour at the party is an actor, who keeps everyone else waiting until long after midnight before he arrives from the Burgtheater, where he's starring in Ibsen's Wild duck. In the first half of the book the narrator thinks in a wing-chair about the party, the pretentious literary guests, and the funeral of his old friend Joana, which he and most of the others had attended that afternoon. Then the dinner starts, with the actor dominating the conversation in a fatuous monologue (Bernhard carefully constructs this so that Ibsen is never actually mentioned, and several of the guests are left with the impression that he's talking about where you can eat the best wild duck...). After the meal, the guests move into the music room, and the actor gets so drunk that his pretentious façade drops and in a mock-Joycean epiphany he actually talks good sense for a short while. This inspired monologue ends with the enigmatic words "Wald, Hochwald, Holzfällen, das ist es immer gewesen" (Forest, high forest, tree-felling, that's what it's always been), which the narrator takes as an ironic summary of Viennese cultural life, and then the party breaks up, with the narrator deciding as he walks home (in a typical Bernhard touch, he's going in precisely the wrong direction) that he must write about this evening right away, before it's too late.

On the surface this is a satirical novel about a bunch of pretentious artistic people spending an evening in fatuous, self-important posing, and about the way artists and critics live by chopping down whatever is beautiful around them. And it's also presumably a roman-à-clef, since it became a runaway bestseller in Austria as soon as it emerged that Bernhard was being sued for libel by a composer with a name very like Auersberger. (Not that Bernhard was any stranger to libel actions: this one, eventually settled out of court, must have been at least his third.) But the real joy of it, as with everything Bernhard wrote, is the way he uses language to drill down and discover meaning. He manipulates words and phrases the way a composer would in a piece of music, modulating, transposing, inverting, repeating, saying something in three or four or a dozen slightly different ways to help us explore exactly what he might mean by using that particular term or expression. He can take a complete cliché and make us see a profound and quite unexpected meaning in it, or he can make an innocent-looking phrase bounce back and expose the shallowness and hypocrisy of the person who used it (you can imagine the unfortunate Frau Auersberger having nightmares about the expression künstlerisches Abendessen for the rest of her life, even as she strikes Bernhard off her guest-list...).

Wonderful, seriously depressing and hilariously funny all at the same time.

36thorold
sep 30, 2016, 10:23 am

I've posted reviews of a number of German books recently in my Club Read thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/226517#5704653 (...and keep on scrolling down). To catch up, here's a quick summary. I read all of these in German: where I know there is a translation, I've mentioned the English title:

Kleist, Moos, Fasane (1987, 1989) by Ilse Aichinger (Austria 1921- )
- lovely, sad, little sketches

Der Stimmenimitator (1978, The voice imitator) by Thomas Bernhard
Das Kalkwerk (1970; The Lime-works) by Thomas Bernhard (Austria, 1931-1989)
- you can't have too much Bernhard!

Helden wie wir (Heroes like us, 1995) by Thomas Brussig (DDR/Germany, 1965 - )
- satirical novel about sexual insecurity and the fall of the Berlin wall

Das Windei (1987) by Gisela Elsner (West Germany, 1937-1992)
- satirical novel about West German capitalism by someone who didn't see the fall of the Berlin wall coming

Aller Tage Abend (2012; The end of days) by Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany, 1967 - )
- author of Visitation (see >7 alalba: above) - weird narrative device, but very interesting novel about the life-story of someone rather like Erpebeck's grandmother

Es geht uns gut (2005) by Arno Geiger (Austria, 1968 - )
- Viennese take on Buddenbrooks 100 years on

Drehtür (2016) by Katja Lange-Müller (DDR/Germany 1951 - )
- nurse reflects on her life outside a revolving door at Munich airport. Or somebody's life...

Stille Zeile sechs (1991; Silent Close No.6) by Monika Maron (DDR/Germany 1941 - )
- young woman gets her revenge on the founding generation of the DDR

Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura (1974; The life and adventures of Trobadora Beatrice, 2000) by Irmtraud Morgner (DDR, 1933-1990)
- batty and wonderful East German feminist troubador fantasy, see >21 noveltea: above

Ein ganzes Leben (2014, A whole life) by Robert Seethaler (Austria, 1966 - )
- subtle, delicate account of a blunt and rugged working man in the Austrian mountains

And two books I've been using to help me navigate a bit through these writers:
Deutsche Literaturgeschichte in einer Stunde : von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart (1920) by Klabund (Germany, 1890-1928)
- super-short account of everything you need to know about German literature from the early middle ages to 1920

Lichtjahre: eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von 1945 bis heute (2006) by Volker Weidermann (Germany, 1969 - )
- covers 1945-2005 - slightly more serious, but still subjective, iconoclastic, and quite gossipy

37SassyLassy
sep 30, 2016, 10:39 am

>36 thorold: Read all these reviews on your CR thread and definitely thought they should be included here.

38rocketjk
okt 9, 2016, 12:55 pm

Germany

As I recently noted on the Dictators group read thread, British writer Richard Hughes' novels, The Fox in the Attic and The Wooden Shepherdess, give an in-depth fictionalized (but evidently thoroughly researched) account of the formation and rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party from its very beginnings through the brutal internal purge known as the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Another plot thread shows us life from the point of view of a noble Bavarian family trying to navigate the shifting ground beneath their feet in the years just after World War One. There are also nice descriptions of the Bavarian countryside, especially in the first book. These are the first two books of a trilogy that Hughes did not get to finish.

39Nickelini
sep 10, 2017, 10:07 pm

I'm looking for literature written by Swiss and set in Switzerland, and not finding much. I wonder what that's all about. Why is there so little Swiss literature?

40spiphany
sep 11, 2017, 3:18 am

>39 Nickelini: Not sure why you are having difficulty; Switzerland has produced a lot of writers and many of them have even been translated into English. Both Dalkey Archive Press and Seagull Books have a series of Swiss literature in translation.

I recently finished reading The Alp by Arno Camenisch, which is very very Swiss and would definitely meet your criteria. Some other writers:
Gottfried Keller, Green Henry
Max Frisch, Man in the Holocene
Jeremias Gotthelf, The Black Spider
Franz Hohler, The Stone Flood
I can't remember whether Friedrich Dürrenmatt's work is explicitly set in Switzerland or not, but I suspect his crime novels, i.e., The Judge and His Hangman probably are.
Martin Suter, A Deal with the Devil
Markus Werner, On the Edge
Alain Claude Sulzer, A Perfect Waiter
Urs Widmer, My Mother's Lover
Ludwig Hohl, Ascent
C.F. Ramuz, Terror on the Mountain
Pedro Lenz, Naw Much of a Talker

41berthirsch
sep 15, 2017, 6:41 pm

The Wandering Jews is my favorite by Joseph Roth
Chess Story my favorite by Stefan Zweig

I have reviewed both for LT.

42rocketjk
Redigerat: sep 19, 2017, 3:09 pm

I just finished the entirely compelling novel, Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, set in Nazi-era Germany (Berlin, to be more precise). The novel drifts down into the dark, dark heart of everyday life under the brutal Nazi regime, and explores the price of resistance. But the core of the story remains oddly uplifting. I have added a more in-depth review on the book's work page.

44thorold
jan 19, 2018, 10:56 am

I keep forgetting these regional threads exist, but they are useful as a reference, so here's a quick list of relevant books from 2017:

Q1 (see also my Club Read thread http://www.librarything.com/topic/243644):
Der Gehülfe : Roman (1908) by Robert Walser (Switzerland, 1878-1956) - inventor's secretary is almost seduced by Swiss middle-class life

Q2 (see also my Club Read thread http://www.librarything.com/topic/254171):
Statt etwas oder Der letzte Rank Roman (2017) by Martin Walser (Germany, 1927- ) - novel by Gruppe 47 survivor who doesn't know when to stop publishing
Gedichte 1950 - 2015 (2014) by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Germany, 1929- ) - poems by Gruppe 47 survivor who should definitely keep on publishing
Frost (1963) by Thomas Bernhard (Austria, 1931-1989) - TB's magnificently depressing first novel
Aufsätze (1913) by Robert Walser (Switzerland, 1878-1956) - fun little essays by the great Swiss eccentric
Draußen nur Kännchen: meine deutschen Fundstücke (2010) by Asfa-Wossen Asserate (Germany, Ethiopia, 1948- ) - upper-class Ethiopian refugee on oddities of German life

Q3 (see also my Club Read thread http://www.librarything.com/topic/260777):
Le figuier sur le toit (2009) by Marguerite Andersen (Canada, Germany, 1924- ) - autobiographical novel by German-Canadian French teacher - childhood in Berlin in the 20s and 30s
‪Mozart-Novelle‪ (1947) by Louis Fürnberg‬ (Germany, Czech Republic, 1909-1957) - Mozart meets Casanova on the eve of the French revolution
Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (1997) by Herta Müller (Germany, Romania, 1953- ) - book-length tram-ride to the Securitate office
‪Die Mansarde‪ (1969) by Marlen Haushofer‬ (Austria, 1920-1970) - why a room of ones own isn't always enough
‪How To Survive als Radfahrer: Wie man auf dem…‪ (2017) by Juliane Schumacher‬ (Germany, 1987- ) - blogger bikes Berlin
‪Rilke : sein Leben, seine Welt, sein Werk‪ (1981) by Wolfgang Leppmann‬ (Germany, USA, 1922-2002) - how to live in castles without actually selling any books
‪Hiob : Roman eines einfachen Mannes‪ (1929) by Joseph Roth‬ (Austria, 1894-1939) - JR vs. God
‪Justiz : Roman‪ (1985) by Friedrich Dürrenmatt‬ (Switzerland, 1921-1990) - Dürrenmatt‬'s last crime story - we know who did it from the opening page, but was it a crime?

Q4 (see also my Club Read thread http://www.librarything.com/topic/270490):
Pawels Briefe (1999) by Monika Maron (DDRGermany, 1941- ) - family memoir with Holocaust and DDR elements
Ich will meinen Mord (1995) by Birgit Vanderbeke (Germany, 1956- ) - Strangers on a train, but no murder
Ostfriesenkiller (2007) by Klaus-Peter Wolf (Germany, 1954- ) - book that started the Ostfriesenkrimi trend
Rücken an Rücken (2011) by Julia Franck (Germany, 1970- ) - another novel about the author's communist grandmother (cf. Jenny Erpenbeck)

45Nickelini
Redigerat: maj 29, 2019, 11:51 am

Perfume, Patrick Suskind, 1986. Translated from German by John E Woods GERMANY


Cover comments: Pretty good, I guess. It's the movie tie in cover, which isn't awful as those go. Doesn't really capture the feel of the book, but does capture the meaning.

Rating: 4.5 stars.

Comments: Well, this was different. I liked that.

Originally written in German, but set entirely in 1700s France, Perfume is the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenoulle, who mother birthed him into a pile of fish guts and immediately abandoned him. He has no scent at all himself, but a supernatural sense of smell, being able to discern scents from even a distance and to store them in his memory. Rising out of the stench of 18th century Paris, he attaches himself to the perfume trade. But his lack of personal smell mirrors his lack of humanity. Smell is all and everything for Jean-Baptiste.

The only thing I have to add is that the whole bit about sultry young virgins having magical scent was sort of ..... ugh and snore at the same time. Obviously written by a man. Do better, male writers! But then again, this was 1986, so ....

Readers who don't like description probably won't like Perfume, but I thought there was some fine writing (and translating). Two of my favourite parts, from the first chapter:

"In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlours stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulphur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneriers, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. people stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces, stank, the churches stank, the stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasants stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master's wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter. For in the eighteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition, and so there was no human activity, either constructive or destructive, no manifestation of germinating or decaying life that was not accompanied by stench.

And of course the stench was foulest in Paris ..... "

(I'm betting that the author read the opening of Dickens' Bleak House). I also love:

"...Grenouille's mother, who was still a young woman, barely in her mid-twenties, and who still was quite pretty and had almost all her teeth in her mouth and some hair on her head and--except for gout and syphilis and a touch of consumption--suffered from no serious disease, who still hoped to live a while yet, perhaps a good five or ten years ..."

Why I Read This Now: Many readers describe this as "creepy," and it's also classified as a crime novel, two things I like to read in October. Didn't really scratch my creepy itch, and not what I think of as a crime novel. YMMV.

Perfume is also on the 1001 and Guardian 1000 lists, and while I'm not actively reading those, I do like to check off some books now and again.

Recommended for: hard to say-- one of those polarizing books with readers at both ends of the scale with valid points. If based on the above bits, you think it sounds good, and you like dark, give it a try.

46thorold
Redigerat: dec 16, 2018, 11:48 am

My 2018 catch-up:

Q1 (see also my Club Read thread http://www.librarything.com/topic/278102):
Zwischenspiel (2015) by Monika Maron (Germany, 1941- ) - bumping into Honecker's ghost on a walk in the park
Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015) by Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany, 1967- ) - I liked this as much as everyone else did!
Verfrühte Tierliebe (1995) by Katja Lange-Müller (Germany, 1951- ) - why is KLM so little translated?

Q2 (see also my Club Read thread http://www.librarything.com/topic/289441):
Etüden im Schnee (2014) by Yōko Tawada (Japan, Germany, 1960- ) - polar bears in Berlin Zoo
Kassandra (1983) by Christa Wolf (DDR, 1929-2011) - not such bad news...
Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: Kassandra: Kassandra Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen (1983) by Christa Wolf (DDR, 1929-2011) - the making of
Die Enten, die Frauen und die Wahrheit (2003) by Katja Lange-Müller (Germany, 1951- ) - duck, duck, go!
Tod eines Kritikers (2002) by Martin Walser (Germany, 1927- ) - self-important rant
Tschick (2010) by Wolfgang Herrndorf (Germany, 1965-2013) - OK YA novel, for those who like that sort of thing

Q3 (see also my Club Read thread http://www.librarything.com/topic/293138):
Ein perfekter Kellner (2004) by Alain Claude Sulzer (Switzerland, 1953- ) - Thomas Mann lookalike steals Swiss waiter's boyfriend from lakeside hotel

Q4 (see also my Club Read thread http://www.librarything.com/topic/296979):
Der Spaziergang, Prosastücke und Kleine Prosa (1917) by Robert Walser (Switzerland, 1878-1956) - lovely!
Tyll (2017) by Daniel Kehlmann (Germany, 1975- ) - modern take on Tyll Eulenspiegel, mixed up with 30 Years' War and Simplicissimus
Die Kapuzinergruft (1938) by Joseph Roth‬ (Austria, 1894-1939) - JR loves FJ
Die Letzten : Aufzeichnungen aus Udo Posbichs Druckerei (2000) by Katja Lange-Müller (Germany, 1951- ) - watch out for the white-space
Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (1668) by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (Germany, 1622-1676) - if you only read one German novel from the 17th century, it will be this one
Der Mann auf dem Hochrad (1984) by Uwe Timm (Germany, 1940- ) - possibly the best taxidermist-on-a-high-wheeler novel I've ever read
Schlechte Wörter (1976) by Ilse Aichinger (Austria, 1921-2016) - for lovers of the western columns

47rocketjk
Redigerat: feb 14, 2019, 2:39 pm

I just finished and highly recommend All for Nothing by German author Walter Kempowski. This final novel by Kempowski tells in muted terms of the horrific last days of World War 2 in East Prussia, as hundreds of thousands of terrified Germans take to the road, fleeing the advancing Russians whose artillery they can already hear. Not as well known in America, I guess, it seems that Kemposwki is considered a classic writer in his native country. He himself, as a teenager, lived through the events this books tells of, only to be imprisoned by the Russians as a spy, serving eight years. Originally published in 2006, a new English publication came out in 2018 as part of the New York Review of Books' Classics series.

48Nickelini
Redigerat: feb 13, 2020, 11:44 pm

Switzerland Italian

Sweet Days of Discipline, Fleur Jaeggy, 1989, translated from Italian by Tim Parks 1991


cover comments: oddly, fits the book rather well

Comments: This 101 page novel is made up of the reflections of a woman looking back on growing up in Swiss boarding schools after WWII. The main focus is when she was 14 at a school in the northeast of Switzerland, where she became infatuated with the reserved and perfect Frederique, and then later, the cheerful Micheline, and had great disdain for all the other girls, including her little German roommate. There's a lot going on here, and a lot unspoken, but it's dark, dark, dark.

I'm not sure what to think of this. There was a strong theme of death woven through the book, but also loneliness, passion and self-control, and madness. With it's short length, it's likely that I'll reread it, because there was something intriguing here -- I'm just not sure what.

Rating: Not sure. 4 stars? Reader reviews of this tend to be very high -- lots of 5 star reviews, few that are much lower. I'm not sure there was enough here for me to give it that level of praise, but I'm happy to reread sometime and reevaluate.

Recommended for: readers who like dark stories set at boarding schools (apparently that's an actual thing). It's a book that can be (probably should be) read in one sitting. People who need action and a linear plot won't like this one.

Why I Read This Now: Still looking for Swiss literature, and everything I can find is written by old white men years ago, which is not what I'm interested in at all. This was more current, although not exactly 21st century, and at least it wasn't androcentric, so it checked off some of the boxes.

49Nickelini
Redigerat: feb 13, 2020, 11:44 pm

Switzerland French

Ring, Elisabeth Horem, 1994, translated from French by Jane Kuntz, 2013


cover comments: This sparse cover suits this book perfectly; also, the white & red spare aesthetic is tres Swiss

Comments: On the first page of the Ring, Quentin's girlfriend announces that she's moving to America with his brother. In a classic "you can't break up with me because I'm breaking up with you" move, Quentin blurts out that that's fine, because he's moving to Tahis anyway. He had no such plan, of course, but had just that morning read an interesting job ad for a position in Tahis. With no prospects in his un-named town in Europe, he applies for and is accepted for the job in Tahis. So off he goes, three time zones east of Western Europe, in a foreign desert country. (From what I can tell, the author invented the city of Tahis. Please tell me if I'm wrong).

In Tahis, he quickly changes jobs and begins work for a consulate issuing visas. All the ex-pats live on the Ring, in the centre of town. Outside of the Ring sprawls the slums of everyone else. Ensconced in the stifling world of the Ring, Quentin is drawn to life outside of it. In short blurb on the back cover, L'Hebdo mentions the "desolation" in this book, which is fitting.

Later in this short novel, and in a bookend to his break up with his girlfriend, Quentin stomps into work with plans to quit, but before he can, he's told he's fired. You can't quit, we're firing you.

Rating: a solid 4 stars

Recommended for: Not sure. This was short, very readable, very odd.

Why I Read This Now: I'm on a hunt for Swiss literature. This was published as part of the Dalkey Archive Swiss Literature Series. I thought it sounded interesting. The Dalkey Archive doesn't make this clear to me why they included this though -- in the author blurb I learn that Elisabeth Horem was born in Bourges, France and lived in the Middle East with her husband, a Swiss diplomat. My Swiss score: 2 out of 3. -- 1) Woman writer: check. 2) New literature: Written in 1994, translated in 2013: sure, check. 3) Set in Switzerland: nope.

50Nickelini
Redigerat: aug 2, 2020, 5:18 pm

ETA - cover has stopped loading -- will come back and fix later

Switzerland German

The Black Spider, Jeremias Gotthelf, 1842 - translated from German by Susan Bernofsky

Why I Read This Now: Every October I go on a creepy book quest. This was one of my better results -- creepy indeed. Also, I'm currently exploring Swiss literature, and this is one of the old classics. It's written by an old, white, religious male, which is way out of my interest zone, but it's reputation as a very early horror novella got me to read it anyway.

Comments: The Black Spider opens with a baptism and feast on an idyllic May day, deep in the Emmental Valley in Switzerland. Between meals, while the men are digesting one spread and resting up for the next (and while the women clean up and start cooking again), the grandfather tells two stories about the forgotten history of the village.

The first was set 600 years earlier, when the villagers were serfs and the area was ruled by a tyrannical knight and his jerk-knight-friends. The knight demands impossible tasks from the serfs. If the serfs attempt the tasks, they are sure to fail, and the knight will kill them. Also, they won't be able to farm, and they will starve. Then they are offered a deal with the devil, and they think they can outsmart him. They also realize that God will smite them for making a deal with the devil. There was never a question of God helping them out of the impossible situation they were thrust into and powerless to change. So really, they're screwed. Anyway, the devil doesn't fool easily and seriously bad things happen involving spiders.

The second story happens 200 years later (if you do the arithmetic, that brings us to around the time of Black Death--definitely intentional). The villagers have forgotten the lessons from last time, and the evil spider force is released yet again. More super creepy spider action.

Back to the frame, with the grandfather and baptism feast. He's ruffled some feathers with his horrific stories but he says it's important people know their history and prevent such horror from happening again.

Jeremias Gotthelf was a pastor, and there is an overabundance of God's weirdness in this. If one looks at the theology a little bit, it presents Christianity in a poor light, despite the author's attempts at the opposite. As with Heidi, I just skimmed over these parts.

Rating: 4 stars. This was actually a more enjoyable read than I expected. Once I got out of the frame and into the grandfather's stories, it had a lovely fairy tale feel. As for the creep-factor, I don't creep easily, but this was one of the better ones I've read in the last decade or so.

Recommended for: fans of NYRB Classics, very early horror, Swiss literature, spiders.
Not Recommended for: arachnophobes

51Nickelini
Redigerat: aug 2, 2020, 5:17 pm

Switzerland German

Cold Shoulder, Markus Werner, 1989; translated from German by Michael Hofmann, 2016

Why I Read This Now: Since my daughter moved to Switzerland, I've been trying to learn as much about the country as I can. Ideally, I want to read contemporary female authors but there aren't many or any translated into English, so this is what I get.

Rating: 4.5 stars

Comments: Through most of this, I thought it was pretty good -- some parts were amusing, and some a bit boring, but overall it was a 38 yr old white guy jabbering on about his mediocre life. I asked myself why some published in 2016 decided they needed to translate this 1989 novel. Was it just that the author was considered one of Switzerland's literary stars? Did the English reading world need another novel about a middle aged white guy navel gazing? But there on page 22, that said middle aged white guy started talking about navel gazing: "he lay there gazing at his navel, . . . He couldn't quite manage to think of himself as an embryo, but he thought he could understand why 'navel-gazing' was a term of disapproval . . . " Hmmm, to devote a whole paragraph to 'navel gazing' in such a short book made me think the author was doing something else here. (Also, I'm interested to learn that this is an expression that is known in German. Google Translate shows "Nabelblick." I wonder if it's in other languages too? A quick check of Google Translate gives me the French word "Nombrilisme" so I think "yes")

Anyway, this short book (117 pages, but they are dense pages because conversations are all blended into a paragraph, unlike what we do in English language books) tells about a few days in a hot Zurich summer when Moritz Wenk, "a moderately unsuccessful artist", goes about his day interacting with his dental hygienist girlfriend Judith, an unhappy friend couple, a dinner party, and a few other people. All fine, and then --wham!-- the last 25 pages had a big, dark, sad twist that I didn't see coming at all. Maybe I was lulled by the ho-hum Swiss life and there was foreshadowing that I missed. I guess I'll have to reread this one day. Yeah, so the end sort of blew me away.

Recommended for: Sure, some readers will say, "but it's still a middle aged white guy and his problems." Fair enough, if you're beyond drowned in those books, I hear you. Yet, for me, the amusing bits and the ending made me like this more than I expected to.

52Nickelini
Redigerat: aug 2, 2020, 5:19 pm

Switzerland German

To the Back of Beyond, Peter Stamm, translated from German by Michael Hofmann (2016)

Comments: From the book's blurb: "Happily married with two children and a comfortable home in a Swiss town, Thomas and Astrid enjoy a glass of wine in their garden on a night like any other. Called back to the house by their son's cries, Astrid goes inside, expecting her husband to join her in a bit. But Thomas gets up and, after a brief moment of hesitation, opens the gate and walks out." The 140 novel has no chapter breaks, but switches back between Thomas going walking through Switzerland, and Astird at home with the kids.

There was something about the writing that drew me in and kept me fascinated. Stamm's style is somewhat sparse and unemotional, but at the same time terrifically evocative. I loved all the little details of their day-to-day movements. The book was the perfect length for this style, although the end was perhaps a bit rushed and could have been another ten pages or so. And until the end, I had no idea how this was going to finish off. I also loved all the Swiss details, large and small. It wasn't until half-way thought the novel that the author started putting in place identifiers, but once he did I started following on a map of Switzerland where the characters were going, and I was delighted when I recognized a place I knew (geography geek coming out again) .

The author also did some tricky things with time. The one that stands out the most is that most of the novel was clearly set around the time it was written, and at one point Thomas reads a newspaper story that happened in September 2014. But then near the end of the book, things move quite quickly, and the children age at least a dozen years from the beginning of the book, and maybe even more. So it goes on past the publication date, which is somewhat unusual.

I think overall the translation was well done, but two things stood out for me. One was that the translator chose to Americanize the novel. Switzerland is a metric country, and I think most Americans reading this would be able to grasp the basic ideas of Celsius and kilometres. And the other quibble was occasionally he'd use an English word in a way I've never seen before. I know that when I use Google Translate with German, the results are sometimes quite rough, especially compared to translations of Italian or French. Maybe German is a trickier language to translate and sometimes the results are a bit odd.

Rating: 4.5 stars

Recommended for: If you like contemporary European novels, and this one sounds interesting, try it. There are lots of poor reviews over at GoodReads, and these generally complain that 1. the reader never learns the characters motivations, 2. the characters aren't particularly likeable and it's difficult to empathize with them, and 3. "OMG, how can he just abandon his family?" My favourite of these reviews says, "Despicable bastard goes on a hike." Okay, they're not wrong. I just don't care.

I do find it interesting how some readers absolutely freak out about abandonment novels. I have 8 books tagged "disappearing mother" in my collection, and of those that are about a woman who left her family, all have scathing reviews about what the character did (as opposed to how the book is written). In the case of To the Back of Beyond, many complained that his behaviour was never explained, but I've read books where it is explained and then people just say "that's no excuse" or "she should have found a different solution." We all have our trigger issues, but if parent abandonment upsets you, rather than tearing into the author for writing about it, how about read something else instead. Maybe that's just not the book for you.

Why I Read This Now: When I started this, I had reservations to be in Switzerland that were then COVID-cancelled. So I had to be there vicariously through literature.

53spiralsheep
Redigerat: aug 2, 2020, 5:29 pm

>51 Nickelini: I recently found a newly translated book by a Swiss woman author, Volatile Texts, but it seems quite a highbrow literary novel.

54Nickelini
aug 2, 2020, 6:09 pm

>53 spiralsheep:
It sounds interesting. Thanks!

55Nickelini
jul 7, 2021, 10:54 pm

Switzerland

On the Edge, Markus Werner, 2004; translated from German by Robert E. Goodwin, 2012

No cover comments because my cover is not available on LT

Comments: Lawyer Thomas Clarin escapes to his second home in Lugano, Switzerland (Italian Switzerland) to write some work-related papers over the Pentecost long weekend. On his first evening, he goes for dinner at an upscale restaurant terrace and strikes up a lengthy conversation with another diner. They drink and chat into the early hours, and then continue the next evening, with their conversation getting more personal as they go on. Sunday noon, Clarin realizes that everything was not what he supposed.

I read Werner's Cold Shoulder last year, and enjoyed it very much indeed. As with that book, this novella started out with paragraphs that sometimes went on for a page or two, and covered the random thoughts of privileged, educated, white men; thoughts that were sometimes interesting, but often navel-gazing nothings. Cold Shoulder had an unexpected twist at the end, and I was promised that On the Edge did too. Unfortunately, the twist came very late in the book, and honestly, I thought it was less than intriguing.

Fun fact 1: On the Edge sent me to google a few times. Most of the novel was set on the terrace at the Hotel Bellevue in Montagnola, which is a real hotel and restaurant: http://bellevue-bellavista.ch/index.php?node=302&lng=4&rif=40f8cd060a (Hmmm, next trip to Lugano?)

The other key location is the Sanatorium and wellness hotel in Cademario, which I googled and found this: https://kurhauscademario.com/en/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&ut... (Hmmm, maybe I want to stay here instead)



Fun fact 2 The original title is Am Hang, which translated into English is "On a Slope". Both of these are a clever play of words on the content of the novel, as well as the three settings of hillside buildings over Lake Lugano. But in French, the title is Langues de Feu, "Tongues of Fire," which I guess also has at least two clever connections to the novel, and ties to what the novel has to say about Pentecost (I never did get why Pentecost was important to this story). But in Italian, it's Quando la Vita Chiama, "When Life Calls," which isn't clever at all, and as my Italian-speaking husband just said, "it sounds like a Harlequin romance."

Rating: Most readers appreciate this more than I did. The writing is good, and I hear it's an excellent reread, but I can't imagine caring enough. I loved the setting in the various hill communities around Lugano. Being generous, I'll give it 3 stars.

Why I Read This Now: it was on my to-read in 2021 list, and I noticed it took place over Pentecost weekend, so I looked up what that was, and this year it coincides with the Victoria Day weekend in Canada, so I saved it for this long weekend. The Pentecost weekend in the book was actually in June (it's tied to Easter, so one of those moving holidays)

Recommended for: Most reader reviewers liked this more than I did. If it appeals, go read it.

56Nickelini
jul 7, 2021, 10:57 pm

Switzerland

Volatile Texts: Us Two, Zsuzsanna Gahse, 2005, translated from German by Chenxin Jiang, 2016


cover comments: On one hand, it fits with the Dalkey Archive look in general. But on the other hand, ugh! This is a book set all over Switzerland -- is this grainy, underexposed photo the best they can do? Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Comments: Zsuzsanna Gahse was born in Hungary and grew up in Austria and Germany. She now lives in Switzerland. The translator Chenxin Jiang was born in Singapore and grew up in Hong Kong and studied at Princeton. Volatile Texts: Us Two is a literary exploration that explores the accents, languages, and landscapes of Switzerland, which is a stand in for all of Europe. The 13 chapters are called "prose miniatures," and they are bits of story and writing with varying degrees of obliqueness.

What I Didn't Like: I'm not in a place in life where I can appreciate high brow literature such Volatile Texts because there is very little narrative. Some of the pieces are more like poetry that anything else.

What I Liked: it was only 121 pages. It takes the reader all over Switzerland, and explores language, and touches on the four national languages of Switzerland (German, French, Italian and Romansch).

Recommended for: readers who love languages -- I admit that quite a bit of the playfulness went over my head. I also think that a knowledge of Switzerland would help picture the author's descriptions (it did for me, anyway).

Rating: 3 stars. At another time of life it would have been more.

Why I Read This Now: I'm always up to try a book from Switzerland

57labfs39
apr 24, 2022, 12:47 pm

GERMANY



My grandmother's braid by Alina Bronsky, translated from the German by Tim Mohr
Published 2019, English translation 2021, 159 p.

I like Alina Bronsky's writing: stark, concise, and darkly humorous. Baba Dunja's Last Love is a favorite, and Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is indelibly etched in my memory. In this, Bronsky's latest book, the protagonist is once again an acerbic, domineering older Russian woman dealing with dislocation, loss, and mother-child-grandchild relationships. Although not as abusive as the grandmother in Hottest Dishes, Margarita Ivanovna is not a particularly likeable character. She is manipulative, secretive, tyrannical, and sharp-tongued; yet there is something compelling in her familial loyalty and enthusiastic living of life.

Max and his grandparents have escaped the collapsing Soviet Union (another Bronsky theme) and are living in immigrant housing in Germany. His grandmother is extremely overprotective and treats Max as both stupid and sickly, neither of which is true. When his grandmother befriends a single mother, Nina, and her young daughter, their lives are irreversibly changed.

Bronsky has been described as one of the authors bringing a post-Cold War, Soviet influence to German literature. She moved to Germany from the Soviet Union in the early nineties, at the age of twelve. She writes in German and created her pseudonym to differentiate between the professional German and familial Russian sides of herself. She has said in interviews that her grandmother characters are not based on any one person, but are a composite of a type of Soviet woman. As regards the humor in her books:

“Sometimes I do readings and people can’t stop laughing, but I’m reading about pretty tragic things,” Bronsky says. “I think Soviet humor is a desperate humor, rather typical of very different nations, of Jewish people, Ukrainians, and of course Russians. It’s despair — just keep laughing, until you are dead.”

Bronsky's work is not for everyone, but if you like dark slice-of-life stories and sardonic wit, give her a try, if you haven't already.

58Gypsy_Boy
Redigerat: dec 13, 2022, 6:25 am

Gottfried Keller has long been a favorite of mine and is a giant of Swiss (and German-language) literature. (If you want to get a sense of his importance, compare the length of the English Wikipedia entry to the length of the German-language one. One of the works for which he is best known is a series of novellas called The People from Seldwyla (Die Leute von Seldwyla). Some of those stories were my introduction to him; the book I'm reviewing here is The Misused Love Letters and Regula Amrain and Her Youngest Son, two more from that collection. (I will get up briefly on my soapbox to say that it's criminal how little of his work is available in English) By now, I imagine I’ve read about half of what has been translated from his prodigious output into English (including his massive, semi-autobiographical 700-page novel, Green Henry and I wish there were more.
Sadly, I must confess that these two stories didn’t overwhelm me. The first tells of a mismatched couple and a tragicomedy of errors; the second deals with Mrs. Amrain’s attachment to her youngest son. German realism at its height; the former is better than the latter but I think he wrote many other better pieces. An excellent introduction for English-speakers, by the way, for those who might be interested, is the Keller volume in “The German Library” published by Continuum—indeed, every volume I have from that series is excellent. It includes half a dozen stories from each of Keller’s most famous collections.

59Trifolia
dec 26, 2022, 3:47 pm

Germany: The Walk by Robert Walser - 3 stars


A seemingly simple story from 1917 turns out to be an allegory of life: a writer leaves his house with the intention of making a number of visits during the day and taking care of business. He starts his walk in good spirits, but gradually his thoughts run away with him and his encounters with others do not all go as planned.
This is a strange story where you get completely inside the head of the rather gaudy writer. I enjoyed the refined writing style, but I think you should read this book in a short period of time with as few interruptions as possible. Only then will you be able to follow the main character's stream of thoughts.
Unfortunately, I was a bit distracted soon after I started reading so I probably should read this book again to fully enjoy it. But I did not like it well enough to do this.

Btw, I looked at the English covers of the book to add to this review, but thought the Dutch cover best represented this book. If you like the cover, you'll probably like the book too.

60Trifolia
dec 26, 2022, 3:48 pm

Germany: The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz - 4,5 stars

In the aftermath of World War II and as the son of a Nazi loyal policeman, Siggi, a young man who is in an institution to be re-educated, is assigned to write an essay on “the joy of duty”. When he fails to get something on paper in time, he is punished and obliged to write the essay after all. It eventually becomes the beginning of a book in which he tells his life story and in which duty plays a leading role.

Flashbacks give us a glimpse of Siggi's life and how he ended up in the situation he is now in. Each chapter is a separate scene in which the storyline is rolled out in fine detail. Leading roles are played by the father and a painter who is forbidden by Berlin to paint, but other characters of his family and close-knit community are fleshed out well too.
In addition, Siggi also tells the story of his experiences in the institution, observing his fellow inmates, the guards and the psychologists who observe them and are supposed to cure them. In the end, you wonder who is more in need of healing.

I thought this was an amazing book. It is very well written, with beautifully crafted characters and an interesting storyline. But especially the way in which Lenz elaborates the theme of duty is impressive. Strongly recommended for those who love books to reflect on.

61Trifolia
dec 26, 2022, 3:48 pm

Austria: Pale Blue Ink in a Lady's Hand by Franz Werfel (1941) - 4 stars


One day, when he receives a letter from a woman he knew long ago, the complacent Leonidas, a middle aged senior civil servant, realizes that his perfectly balanced life might come to an end.
Packed with satire, humour and compassion, this superb novella about the inner struggle of a man also accurately reflects the zeitgeist and standards of the 1930s in Austria.
Franz Werfel was the third husband of the notorious Alma Mahler-Gropius-Werfel and his wife might have had an influence on this novella.
Although I do not find an English cover here on LT, I'm certain this book has been translated. It's well worth reading.

62Tess_W
Redigerat: jan 29, 2023, 11:30 pm

AUSTRIA
Hotel Sacher by Rodica Doehnert translated by Alison Layland

There is a real Hotel Sacher and this work of historical fiction begins in the very late 19th century and ends in 1916ish. From the title, one would think that the story would focus on Anna Sacher, who took over the hotel ownership and management after the death of her husband. However, the hotel plays only a minor part in this novel. I was expecting to get a flavor for pre-war Vienna, but that also was not the case. Most of the story centers around the publishing business, the pre-war Peace Committee, and people behaving badly. There was a plethora of characters and hence the book was heavy on dialogue while light on sensory description. The author makes only rudimentary mention of the assassinations of The Empress, the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf, and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. If you are wanting a sense of Vienna pre WWI, I can not recommend this book. The author is a German screenwriter, and I can see that this might be a better movie than a book.

63kjuliff
feb 7, 2023, 11:46 pm

>4 avaland: I read this so long ago I can’t remember why the pigeon changed everything. I remember seeing the movie and the pigeon scene was in it, but I couldn’t work out the why. Is there a why? Or is it just marking a point in time?

64troyschwab
mar 25, 2023, 4:06 pm

Hello everyone,

I hope you're all enjoying the weekend!

I'm new to this website but have been focusing on global reading for the past year or so. The last book I had finished was Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Glad to have completed it, especially as it was an old recommendation from GCW.

I think I could have spent more time with it-enjoyed it more but for some reason I felt like it began to drag on in the middle and my attention lapsed here or there. Regardless, very good read. When Rilke slips into his prose to describe Italy and the stairs I really perked up.. There are so many letters from him that it's easy for one to forget he is a genuine, excellent, writer. More than anything I think the letters spurred me on to want to read more of Rilke's poetry as well as Mogens and Other Stories by Jacobsen (which both Rilke and Kappus fawn over).

A rainy gray day here, so I stopped into my favorite used bookstore and, low and behold, several excellent copies of Rilke's hardcover poetry. Duino Elegies and some Norton compilation -- both well loved in their previous life and side by side with the original German.

I'll look forward to reading them when I eventually return to Austria.. (although, I am very excited to read Young Torless which I had found in this very same book store. It caught my eye and I got it-later I was pleased to find it on a Bloom list).

Please everyone enjoy the day, cheers
Troy

65labfs39
jan 13, 8:35 am

GERMANY



The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers, translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo
Published 1942 in both German and English, 402 p., NYRB

Netty Reiling, pen name Anna Seghers, was a German Jew and a communist, both of which made her a target when the National Socialists came to power in 1933. She fled with her Marxist husband and two children to Paris, and then had to flee again in 1940 when the Germans occupied France. She stayed in Mexico City until 1947 when she returned to East Germany. Her experiences as a communist and having to continually flee, one step ahead of the Nazis, lend authenticity to the novel, as does the research she did into conditions within prison camps at the time. Her novel was extremely popular in the US and was made into a movie starring Spencer Tracey in 1944 and an abridged edition was given to US soldiers going to the European theatre, although many of the references to communism were deleted. The main character was seen as a symbol of successful resistance, as well as the book as a whole being a window into the German psyche.

Although divided into seven chapters, taking place over seven days, the novel moves between the main character, George Heisler, and thirty other characters in over 100 episodes. The continual movement between characters and scenes might have been choppy in another author's hands, but instead works well here, creating increasing tension. The novel opens in a prison barracks, with the prisoners wondering if the seventh escapee is still at large. We then immediately switch to descriptions of the countryside outside Mainz as a young man, Franz Marnet, pedals his bike through the early morning fog on his way to work. At the factory, he learns of an escape from the nearby concentration camp of seven prisoners, one of whom he might know. It is only then that George Heisler is introduced, hiding in a ditch outside the camp, heart-pounding and desperate. Although George's desperate attempt to reach safety is the main plotline, the back and forth between him and the other escapees, people he knows, his family, and the guards at the camp creates an almost unbearable tension. As one by one the other escapees are captured and George's situation becomes increasing tenuous, I had to put the book down to break the spell, only to find myself drawn back to it, unable to escape as well.

The situation of German communists, labor organizers, and others in the years 1933 to the start of the war was a time period about which I was not well versed. I knew that many were sent to prisons such as Dachau, but the conditions and treatment of communists both by the SA and by everyday Germans was complex. Families sometimes contained both SS members and communists. Former party members might still be loyal, but silent, or they may have succumbed to societal pressure and economics. Communities might come together to help a neighbor on the run, or might isolate an entire family. Segher's novel sheds light on these complexities while at the same time being very straightforward and realistic. Although parts of it read like an adrenaline-driven escape novel, on another level it's a testament to the ties that bind people even when faced with unbearable consequences. And although some people will break under pressure, others find the strength to resist, even unto death.

66kjuliff
jan 24, 2:09 pm

>65 labfs39: The situation of German communists, labor organizers, and others in the years 1933 to the start of the war was a time period about which I was not well versed.
This period and the six years before it are covered in Australian writer Anne Funder’s All That I Am. This period is neglected in historical fiction and I was interested to read about it in Funder’s book.