'Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter' ('The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick') by Peter Handke (Review)

It's German Literature Month time again, and today I have the pleasure of reviewing a book by a writer I've read for the first time.  We're off to Austria, in a book which has surprisingly little to do with football, but a lot to do with language...

*****
Peter Handke's Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick***) starts off in Vienna.  Josef Bloch, a former professional goalkeeper, thinks he's been fired from his job, so he goes off and checks into a hotel.  Over the next few days, he reads newspapers, watches films, meets people and generally idles his time away.

The dramatic, Kafakaesque first sentence then soon gives way to a strange, uneventful story.  The story stutters along, stumbling over simple sentences, in a bizarre, disjointed manner - until, after hooking up with a woman:

"Sie stand auf und legte sich aufs Bett; er setzte sich dazu.  Ob er heute zur Arbeit gehe? fragte sie.
Plötzlich würgte er sie."
p.22 (Suhrkamp, 1972)

"She stood up and then lay down on the bed; he seated himself next to her.  She asked whether he was going to work today.
Suddenly, he strangled her." (my translation)

Boom.  Out of nothing, the story takes a new, and rather violent, turn - before slowing down again immediately.  Bloch calmly leaves and takes a bus to the country...

The story itself is only 100 pages or so, and in terms of plot, there's not a lot to it.  While you might think it's about a murder, in reality (if such a word is relevant here), it's all about Bloch and his strange relationship with the world.  From the very start, he acts decidedly strangely, and he has an unusual take on reality, seeing each second, each motion, step by step:

"Die Kellnerin nahm das Glas von der Flasche, auf die sie es gestülpt hatte, legte den Bierdeckel auf den Tisch, stellte das Glas auf den Deckel, kippte die Flasche in das Glas, stellte die Flasche auf den Tisch und ging weg.  Es fing schon wieder an!  Bloch wußte nicht mehr, was er tun sollte." (pp.34/5)

"The barmaid took the glass off the bottle over which she had placed it, laid the beer mat on the table, put the glass on the beer mat, tipped the bottle into the glass, put the bottle on the table and went.  It was starting all over again!  Bloch had no idea what to do."

There's an awful lot of this in the book.  Bloch seems overwhelmed by the input of raw data in everyday life, unable to simply filter it out like a 'normal' person...

Bloch also struggles with language and noise and has great difficulty in distinguishing sounds (he's constantly mistaken as to what he thinks he hears).  He seems to be seeing and hearing life through a filter, one which makes it difficult for him to understand precisely what is going on around him.  As is mentioned in the brief introduction at the start of the book, these errors are like a leitmotif, constantly appearing throughout the novel.

Having just killed someone, you can understand that Bloch has a certain sense of paranoia, but there's more to it than that, and everything is wearing him down.  He seems to struggle with the simplest of actions, whether it's greeting someone in the street or choosing the right time to enter a conversation.  Still, he just moves on, even if his interactions seem to end in arguments, conversations and fights.  At times, he seems like an alien who understands the language perfectly but has little cultural background
(and a very shaky grasp on manners...).

Like its central character, this is a very difficult and uncomfortable book to read at times.  Handke is playing with language and the way it affects our experience of the material world, and no word, or sentence, is taken for granted, each utterance weighed carefully before being committed to paper.  It's very tempting on occasion to try to read things into the story which perhaps aren't there.  Is Bloch suffering from some sort of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?  Is he just concussed from one too many kicks to the head?  Surely there's a deeper meaning to the title?

In fact, later on we hear about a goalie and Bloch's views on the game:

"Es ist sehr schwierig von den Stürmern und dem Ball wegzuschauen und dem Tormann zuzuschauen", sagte Bloch.  "Man muß sich vom Ball losreißen, es ist etwas ganz und gar Unnatürliches." (p.117)

"It is very difficult to look away from the attackers and the ball, and look at the goalkeeper", said Bloch.  "You have to tear yourself away from the ball, it's something completely and utterly unnatural."

Yet this is what we've been doing all along.  In a crime novel where the police are elsewhere, in living the story through Bloch the reader is effectively watching the goalie...  Yes, it is decidedly unnatural - and rather uncomfortable too ;)

*****
The English-language version, translated by Michael Roloff, is available from Farrar, Straus & Giroux

'Wir Fliegen' ('We're Flying') by Peter Stamm (Review)

One of my favourite contemporary German-Language writers is Swiss author Peter Stamm.  I've enjoyed three of his novels so far, but Stamm doesn't just write long books - he's also adept at the shorter form and has published four collections to date.  With not many of his novels left to try then, I thought it was high time I tried Stamm's shorter work to see how it compares to the longer books - and when better than during German Literature Month? :)

*****
Wir Fliegen (We're Flying)*** is a 2008 collection consisting of twelve stories, the majority coming in at somewhere around twelve pages.  The style and language is unmistakably Stamm, with his clipped, simple language and the slightly uncomfortable feeling he evokes in his creations.  However, the smaller canvas he works on in his stories means that matters come to a head a lot more quickly.

If there's a connecting theme here, it's one of frustration.  'Die Verletzung' ('The Hurt') is a story of summer love, with the boy returning years later to the village, only to be disappointed that the girl has become a woman who wants no part of him.  In 'Männer und Knaben' ('Men and Boys'), a night-time visit to a swimming pool also brings back memories of a youthful romance, albeit one which never quite happened:

"Lukas konnte sich nicht vorstellen, worüber sie sprachen, er konnte sich nicht erinnern, worüber Franziska die ganze Zeit mit ihm gesprochen hatte.  Irgendwann würde sie nichts mehr zu erzählen wissen.  Vielleicht war das der Moment, in dem man sich küsste.  Bevor man sich küsste, musste man still sein."
'Männer und Knaben', p.113 (Fischer Verlag, 2009)

"Lukas couldn't imagine what they had talked about, he couldn't remember what Franziska had talked to him about the whole time.  At some point, she must have run out of things to say.  Perhaps that was the moment in which you were supposed to kiss.  Before you kissed, you had to be silent." (My translation)

Regrets - he has a few...

Several stories also look at the distance which exists between two people, a gap which can never quite be bridged.  The first story, 'Die Erwartung' ('Expectations'), looks at a relationship between two neighbours, one which somehow never manages to get off the ground.  There's something not quite right about the man, and the interaction between the couple is stilted (and slightly creepy...).  In 'Fremdkörper' ('A Foreign Body'), this sense of unease is heightened when a cave explorer spends an unusual evening with a couple he's just met.  Even in a moment of intimacy, Stamm uses the subjunctive, indirect speech to create a sense of distance.

"Das mache nichts, sagte sie.  Das könne jedem passieren."
('Fremdkörper', p.33)

"She said that it didn't matter. That it could happen to anyone."

It's a structure that's more common in German than English, but I always feel that Stamm uses it deliberately to create a wall between the reader and the narrator - and the narrator and the people they are interacting with.

Stamm also explores the effect of traumatic events from the past on the present.  'Videocity' is a short piece which shows how a video shop owner has been crushed by the loss of his mother at an early age, and in 'Der Brief' ('The Letter') a widow finds out about her dead husband's infidelities and wonders how she should react to the discovery.  Perhaps the most disturbing of these stories though is 'Drei Schwestern' ('Three Sisters'), in which a housewife with a passion for art is bored, trapped at home with her son.  It is only when we travel back into her past that we realise why we should sympathise - and how many people have conspired to bring her to her current state...

Of course, there's always room, and time, to turn your life around, and two of the better stories look at this idea of a tipping point.  In 'Der Befund' ('The Result'), a man waits for his biopsy results, using the time alone working the night shift at a hotel to work out what he wants from life.  The title story, 'Wir Fliegen' ('We're Flying'), also follows this thought, with a childcare worker forced to care for a child after hours seeing her partner through new eyes - and it's not a pretty picture.

There's not a lot of hope and joy in the collection, but there is a kind of light at the end of the tunnel.  The penultimate story, 'Kinder Gottes' ('Children of God')  involves a priest in a small town somewhere (anywhere) in Central Europe.  When a young woman falls pregnant, claiming never to have had sex, the town initially scoffs.  However, the priest, an outsider, begins to wonder...  Could this really be an immaculate conception - the second coming in his parish?  The story has all the signs of an impending disaster, but it actually provides a happy ending for the collection as a whole.  People want to believe, and it really could happen...

Overall, I found Wir Fliegen enjoyable, and there's definitely enough there to make me come back for another look at Stamm's shorter writing.  Despite the piles of books mounting in my study, I feel another (virtual) trip to The Book Depository coming on...

*****
An English-language version, We're Flying (translated by Michael Hoffman), is available from Granta Books (UK)/ Other Press (US)

'Bozena' by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (Review)

German Literature Month is back with another female writer today, one whose work I've tried (and enjoyed) before.  It's another piece of classic G-Lit, but the bus is taking us further afield for this work - we're off to Slovakia...

*****
Božena was 'Austrian' writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach's first major success.  It's set in a provincial town in Slovakia (at the time, part of the Austrian Empire), and it's the tale of the fortunes of the family of a wine merchant, Herr Heißenstein.  After his first wife dies, leaving him with a daughter but no son, he remarries in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to provide himself with a male heir.  Instead, he gains another daughter, and when the old man dies, the outlook is bleak for the elder daughter with a nasty step-mother around.  However, the girl does have someone on her side...

That someone is Božena, the housekeeper, an attractive woman who also happens to be rather big and strong (in my head she was a dead ringer for Xena, Warrior Princess...).  Božena is hard-working and fiercely protective of Rosa, and when her poor girl passes away later in the story, the housekeeper also takes care of Rosa's daughter, Röschen.  With wicked step-mothers, gigantic housekeepers and girls named after flowers, the novel has a decided fairy-tale feel to it: but will there be a happy ending?

Despite the title of the book, the main focus (eventually) is on Regula, the younger Heißenstein daughter, and her niece, Röschen.  Once the elder generation is out of the way, the story hinges on the rather plain and dull woman's attempt to have her wealth snare her a desirable husband, all the time attempting to treat her niece as poorly as possible without affecting her public image of a kind, gracious lady.  The problem is that handsome young men are more inclined to chase pretty faces than ugly purses, and Röschen is very attractive indeed...

The novel is set in the middle of the nineteenth century, a time of social unrest and revolutions:

"Die Revolution ging indessen unaufhaltsam ihren Gang.  Pöbelunruhen in Wien, Bürgerkrieg in Ungarn, die Oktobertage, die Abreise der kaiserlichen Familie nach Olmütz, die Desertion der Tschechen aus dem Reichstage..."

"Meanwhile, the revolution went unstoppably on its way.  Popular unrest in Vienna, civil war in Hungary, the October Days, the departure of the Imperial family for Olmütz, the desertion of the Czechs from the parliament..." (my translation)

These events have several serious consequences for the characters of the novel.  For one thing, Rosa's husband is a soldier, and he is to be sent off into these lengthy and dangerous conflicts taking place in Central Europe.  In a wider sense, the unrest affects the social stability of the region, leading to the rise of the merchant classes and the poverty of nobles - a state of affairs which allows Regula to dream of her alliance.

Božena is a big personality and a great creation, even if she disappears a little from the story at times.  Her strength and honesty are crucial to the plot, and even the moment of her greatest disgrace serves to push the story along, showing as it does her unswerving honesty.  Despite her flaws and low standing, she is not a woman to be crossed lightly - even the men fear her for her fiery temper and her powerful presence.

There is also an impressive cast of bit parts to complement the main characters.  The professor who falls in love with the plain Regula, a man who can't help being attracted to the plain, dull head of the household, is great comic value.  Božena also has a (platonic) admirer in Mansuet Weberlein, Herr Heißenstein's right-hand man, and Weberlein is vital in holding things together when the wine merchant disowns his daughter.

As in Das Gemeindekind (The Parrish Child), the first book I tried by this writer, the story betrays constant touches of humour, especially sarcasm.  A nice example of the light tone is shown in the description of Heißenstein's first meeting with Nannette, where she:

"...enteilte mit so gleichmäßigen kleinen Schritten, daß es war, als rolle sie auf unsichtbaren Rädern über den Kies des Weges dahin."

"...hurried away with such even little steps that it was as if she were rolling away across the gravel on invisible wheels."

This eye for detail is constant throughout the book, although Ebner-Eschenbach can be a lot more cutting on occasion.

To be honest, Božena is not nearly as good as Das Gemeindekind though.  It's fairly predictable, and we always know where we're going, with the plot just plodding along at one pace.  The writing rarely stops to reflect on what's happening, and the story is far too plot-driven, leaving reflection and detail aside.  There's also the rather clichéd step-mother trope, which doesn't exactly leave us wondering where the story's heading...

This book was written eleven years before Das Gemeindekind, and I could really see the difference and the development shown in the later work.  While Božena is enjoyable in parts, it's really a fairly slight work, one that only the purists are likely to read.  Still, there's enough in Ebner-Eschenbach's style to have me trying another work at some point - and I'll be looking for a later novel to see if my hunch is right :)

*****
As far as I can see, Božena isn't available in English.  In fact, I'm not sure if there is anything of Ebner-Eschenbach's work readily available in translation...

'Wellen' ('Waves') by Eduard von Keyserling (Review)

Today, we're looking at a German classic, but I have some sad news for you before I begin.  You see, I've had a good look around the net, and I haven't been able to find any translations of this writer's work into English.  I'm afraid most of you will just have to read the review and take my word on its merits...

*****
At the end of the first German Literature Month, Caroline chose Eduard von Keyserling's Wellen (Waves) as her gift to Lizzy, and I decided to follow her recommendation and get a copy for myself.  The blurb claims that Keyserling is "the Baltic (Theodor) Fontane", and anyone who has read any of Ted's work will see the comparisons very quickly.

Wellen takes place on the Baltic coast, part of Germany's former East Prussian territories.  A noble family is going to spend the summer at their traditional family home, and the Baroness' mother is preparing for their imminent arrival.  The visiting party consists of the Baron and Baroness, their three children, and their elder daughter Lolo's fiancé, Hilmar, and the extended family settles down for an enjoyable, relaxing summer.

However, there is a cloud in the sky of their contentment.  Down on the beach, in a little fisherman's cottage, Doralice, a beautiful young woman, is spending her honeymoon with her new husband Hans, a painter.  All well and good, but Doralice is actually well known to her noble neighbours as she used to be one of them - until she left her elderly husband for the painter...

While the Baroness is appalled at the prospect of spending time in the presence of the fallen woman, the rest of her family get over the surprise a little more easily.  The children are entranced by her beauty and follow her around, spying on her whenever possible.  However, it is the interest other members of the party show in Doralice which complicates matters.

Wellen is a beautifully-written (short) novel, and (as mentioned earlier) the comparisons with Fontane are fully justified.  Like Fontane, von Keyserling takes well-off Germans and their trivial woes as his centrepiece, and he develops his characters far more than the many nineteenth-century novella writers did.  There's always a sense of proportion and humour to the writing too, just to balance out the melodrama and romanticism:

"Du sprachst da vorhin wegwerfend von Kartoffelsuppe, ich möchte sagen, kein Leben, auch das idealste, ist möglich, in dem es nicht einige Stunden am Tage nach Kartoffelsuppe riecht."
p.25 (dtv, 2011)

"You were talking dismissively before about potato soup, I have to say that no life, even the most perfect, is possible in which, for a few hours a day, it doesn't smell of potato soup." (my translation)

Hans' half-joking remark to Doralice is a little too close to home though - the former Countess is not one to resign herself to a life lacking in romance.

The tragedy of the book (and it is giving little away to indicate that there are problems ahead) is that Doralice's beauty, which shines so brightly that all around her are attracted like moths to the flame, is coupled with a character that needs stimulation, adoration and romance.  The adventure of running off with her painter is fading into history, and she finds it difficult to accept the quiet domesticity that seems to be her lot.  Struggling to settle down (for the second time!) into married life, she shows traces of regret at the comfortable life she left behind.

Matters aren't helped though by the way in which Hans repeats the mistake Doralice's first husband made.  Like the elderly Count, Hans wishes to possess Doralice, form her, mould her into his creation.  Hilmar's comment to Lolo sums up the prevailing sentiment towards wives:

"Willst du mich überraschen?  Wozu?  Nein, unsere Bräute sollen nicht Überraschungen sein, sondern hübsche Notwendigkeiten." (p.67)

"Do you want to surprise me?  What for?  No, our brides shouldn't be surprises but pretty necessities."

The attentive reader can see trouble coming a mile off - which is not to say that this is how matters will play out...

The writing in Wellen is beautiful, even if the description is laid on a little thickly in some places, and the centrepiece of the book, as you may have guessed from the title, is the Baltic Sea itself, the glittering, shimmering backdrop for the story.  In fact, at one point, it is pointed out that the shore is a stage, one on which the many characters parade and act out their drama.  For the most part, the sea is content to remain passive, calm and serene in the background, but there is the occasional reminder that this won't always be the case.  On a walk with another holidaymaker, Doralice comes across an old cemetery and is shown bones poking out of the sand.  The corpses are slowly being claimed by the sea during storms, piece by piece - now if that's not a subtle foreshadowing of events... ;)

I greatly enjoyed Wellen, and I'm happy to have found another classic German author who wrote more than novellas.  Short works are all well and good, but it's nice to have something with a bit more depth, and nineteenth-century German literature can be a bit short(!) on longer novels.  Sadly, as I pointed out at the beginning of the post, if your German's not that hot, you're out of luck.  On the other hand, if you can read in German (and have a Kindle), I have some good news for you - most of von Keyserling's work is available free in electronic form.  You're welcome ;)

'Holzfällen' ('Woodcutters') by Thomas Bernhard (Review)

German Literature Month rolls on, and so too does the bus, taking us to the next stop on our literary travels.  Today we're off to Vienna, where we're expected at a dinner party, or rather "an artistic supper".  The hosts, and the guests, are friendly and welcoming - although, there is this one man...

*****
That man, of course, is the barely-concealed alter-ego of Austrian writer Thomas Berhard, and the book is his novel Holzfällen (Woodcutters***).  It's a deceptively rambling novel, a story that unfolds over more than three-hundred pages of circling vitriol from a man who despises the company he finds himself in.

The narrator is seated in a comfortable chair in a dark corner, having been invited by some old acquaintances to attend their:

"...künstlerischen Abdendessen mit dem berühmten Burgschauspieler."
p.39 (Suhrkamp, 2012).

This arty supper, ostensibly in honour of a famous stage actor, happens to coincide with a rather more sombre event, the funeral of a former friend.  Joana, a failed dancer and actress, hung herself in her home in the country, and the narrator (a thinly-veiled Bernhard) and the rest of the Viennese cultural milieu have paid their final respects before moving on to an evening of food and theatre chatter.

As we wait for the guest of honour to arrive, the narrator sits in his chair, scowling upon the other guests as they prattle on in the room across the hall.  Recently returned to Vienna after a long, self-imposed exile in London, he despises the empty-headed, vain, self-serving world of the Viennese literati and sits in judgement on them from his dark throne - and still we wait for the actor to arrive...

Holzfällen is my first view of Bernhard's world, but it was pretty much everything I'd expected it to be from the reviews and comments I'd read.  The thirty pages or so that I read in the first sitting were a confronting, circular mass of sentences, deliberate repetition building into a dizzying wall of words seemingly intended to obscure meaning and prevent progress into the heart of the story.  Slowly though I began to make headway, and once I'd become more accustomed to the style, the story started to make sense.  Again and again, we return to the focal points of the story, the writer sitting in his chair, and the moment when he accepts the invitation from his former acquaintances, thus undoing the work of several decades of exile in a moment.

It's a moment of weakness which he regrets, loathing as he does the cultural side of his former home:

"Diese entsetzliche Stadt Wien, dachte ich, die mich tief in die Verzweiflung und tatsächlich wieder einmal in nichts als in Ausweglosigkeit gestürzt hat..." (p.11)

"This horrendous city Vienna, I thought, which had plunged me deep into despair and, once again, into nothing but hopelessness..." (My translation)

It's a city which attracts would-be artists and writers from the provinces, sucking them in, then chewing them up and spitting them out, broken, damaged.  As he muses:

"Wien ist eine fürchterliche Genievernichtungsmaschine, dachte ich auf dem Ohrensessel, eine entsetzliche Talentezertrümmerungsanstalt." (p.97)

"Vienna is a terrible Genius-destruction machine, I thought in the wing chair, a horrendous talent-destruction installation."

The supper he has come to take part in, with its self-gratulating writers and alcoholic musicians is unlikely to soften him in his views.

The death of Joana, a woman he was once very close to, is the proof we are given of this terrible world.  Drawn to the metropolis at an early age, she becomes a part of the cultural community but never quite manages to make it, and when things go wrong, she is abandoned, only to be patronised and fondly remembered after her death.  The unfortunate, coincidental scheduling of the supper on the day of the funeral seems oddly apt - not even death stops the literary schmoozing...

The central image of the writer sitting and thinking in his 'Ohrensessel' (translated as 'wing chair' in the English version) is one of a tyrant sitting in judgement over the guilty.  From his dark corner, he can see the other guests in the brightly-lit room while they can only see an outline through the clouds of cigarette smoke, a vaguely-suspected image sitting silently and yet with a presence felt from a distance.  He casts down his unheard thunderbolts on the uneasy Viennese, punishing them mentally for their fakeness, their unceasing pursuit of public honours and, above all, for their ceaseless chatter.

However, the longer the novel goes on, the more the reader sees cracks appear in the writer's facade and story.  The truth is that he is as guilty as all the others of using those around and above him to make his way to the top, financially and sexually, and if anyone is to be blamed for abandoning poor Joana, he would be right near the top of the list...

Holzfällen is a novel which takes some getting used to, but once you have caught the circular rhythm, it's a joy to read, a hypnotic style of writing which, while appearing slightly random, is actually incredibly-tightly plotted.  This circular, repetitive motion, the structure of a single, gigantic paragraph, and the constant reminders that a story is being told (we are constantly torn back from a story by "...I thought..." and "...as I sat in the wing chair...") are unmistakably Sebaldian.  Except, of course, that it is actually the other way round - in many ways Sebald is Bernhardian.  Having read a lot about the influence Sebald has had on writing over the past decade or two, it's nice to see who influenced him :)

Of course, the question you probably won't be are all asking is whether the actor actually ever arrives at the supper (and whether the writer ever makes it out of his comfy chair).  I'll let you find that out for yourselves - you can't expect me to tell you everything ;)  Rest assured though, the tone remains the same, and the writer retains his bitter demeanour for the whole of the novel.  And that's something to enjoy...

*****
The English-language version (Woodcutters, translated by David McLintock) is available from Faber and Faber.

January in Japan 2014

We interrupt coverage of German Literature Month for a breaking news flash - it has just been announced that January in Japan will be back in 2014!  Yes, that's right, another month of J-Lit wonders to enjoy as you struggle through the cold winter days (or go to the beach - depends where you are...).  January is also the last month of Bellezza's Japanese Literature Challenge, so the event will give you all a reason to fit in a final book or two before it's all over.

So, what's it all about?  Pretty simple, really.  You just have to read, and review, any work of Japanese literature next January and then post the review to the January in Japan Blog.  Last year, we had about seventy reviews, of all kinds of books (classics to crime, romance to non-fiction), and I'm hoping for more this time around.  Remember - anything is OK, as long as it's made in Japan ;)

That's not all though.  Last year saw the start of the J-Lit Giants project, easy introductions to big names in Japanese literature, with seven posts contributed by myself and a few other bloggers.  This year, I hope to continue the series, and I'd appreciate your help with this.  If anyone is interested in submitting a piece, please let me know, and we can arrange for you to add to the list of biographies.  I'd be particularly interested in having people write about female writers as there was no giantess among the first group of giants...

Once again, I'll be trying to keep up with the literary news from Japan (and it's amazing how much there is when you actively look for it).  If anyone has any favourite sites, just send me the links as I'd love to add them to the list (which badly needs overhauling...).  I'm also sure that Momotarō will be back each Sunday with his Nichi-Yōbi News segment, keeping us all up-to-date with what's happening ;) 

In short, then:

- Keep a reading spot in January free for J-Lit

- Think about who should be in the next group of inductees for our Hall of Fame

- Send me your links to great J-Lit sites

Oh, and there may well be a readalong and (if you're lucky) also a prize or two.  So, what are you waiting for?  Bookmark the January in Japan blog today:)

'Austerlitz' by W.G. Sebald (Review)

Time for more from German Literature Month, and today we're looking at a male author, one a few of you may have heard of.  I loved my first book by W.G. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn), so I've been meaning to get to today's offering for a long time - and what better time than November?  Time to hop on board the bus for another Sebaldian journey of discovery :)

*****
Austerlitz*** sees an unnamed narrator, on a pointless trip to the Belgian city of Antwerp, make a chance acquaintance in an ostentatious railway station waiting room.  The person he meets, Jacques Austerlitz, is a man obsessed with buildings and form, travelling all over western Europe to inspect and photograph the architecture, and a rapport soon arises between the two men.

Despite this, they make no real plans to meet in the future, and their subsequent meetings are, once again, bizarrely random.  Even more unusual is the way that Austerlitz treats each meeting as a continuation of the last conversation, starting off their chats where they had broken off last time.  Of course, 'chats' is probably a misnomer - in reality, the book consists of Austerlitz telling his new acquaintance his story.  It's worth it though, a tale of a boy, two names and a continent at war...

Austerlitz is a holocaust story with a difference; in fact, we're not even sure it is one until half-way through.  The title character is a boy whose identity is a mystery - having grown up as Dafydd Elias in the Welsh countryside, it comes as quite a shock for him to find out that his real name is Jacques Austerlitz.  Part of the delay in finding out the man's identity lies squarely on his own shoulders though, as he deliberately looks the other way for most of his life, afraid of what he might find.  By the time he belatedly decides to search for information about his background, we sense that it might be too late (although we're also not entirely sure that it matters that much...).

Everything in the novel, despite the languid manner, is carefully planned.  Nothing is left to chance, and every detail reappears in its right place later in the story.  Near the start, the narrator offers the reader descriptions of Antwerp's old defensive walls and estates for workers to reside in.  Little do we know at the time that these off-the-cuff remarks actually foreshadow more ominous versions of the buildings later in the text.  Buildings, stars, pictures, tents in the desert - in Sebald's work, everything has its place...

The story, and the events described within it, go back and forth, are unpredictable.  Buildings in London echo train stations on the continent, lakes in different countries evoke echoes of each other (even when one of them is hiding a chilling secret).  Every detail contributes to a greater idea, another piece in the puzzle, at times a matter of life and death:

"An der wand über der niedrigen Werkbank Evans, sagte Austerlitz, hing von einem Haken der schwarze Schleier, den der Großvater von der Bahre abgenommen hatte, als die kleinen vermummten Gestalten sie vorübertrugen an ihm, und gewiß ist es Evans gewesen, sagte Austerlitz, der mir einmal sagte, mehr als ein solches Seidentuch trenne uns nicht von der nächsten Welt."
pp.83/4 (Fischer Verlag, 2011)

"On the wall above Evans' low work bench, said Austerlitz, there hung from a hook the black veil which Evans' Grandfather had taken from the funeral bier as the small, masked figures carried it past him, and it must also have been Evans, said Austerlitz, who told me once that nothing more than such a piece of silk separates us from the next life." (my translation)

Life and death, apparently, are closer together than we like to think.

This is, according to Sebald (according to Austerlitz) because time is like a river.  It flows, just like the text, but not in a straight, usual, temporal manner.  The writer provides us with frequent reminders that the past and future are always there, ready to be unlocked when someone finds the right key:

"Es scheint mir nicht, sagte Austerlitz, daß wir die Gesetze verstehen, unter denen sich die Widerkunft der Vergangenheit vollzieht, doch ist es mir immer mehr, als gäbe es überhaupt keine Zeit, sondern nur verschiedene, nach einer höheren Stereometrie ineinander verschachtelte Räume, zwischen denen die Lebendigen und die Toten, je nachdem es ihnen zumute ist, hin und her gehen können, und je länger ich es bedenke, desto mehr kommt mir vor, daß wir, die wir uns noch am Leben befinden, in den Augen der Toten irreale und nur manchmal, unter bestimmten Lichtverhältnissen und atmosphärischen Bedingungen sichtbar werdende Wesen sind." (p.269)

"It seems to me, said Austerlitz, that we don't understand the laws, through which the eternal repetition of the past occurs, but I feel more and more as if there is no time, rather just various rooms, nestled inside each other according to a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead, as they desire, can go back and forth, and the longer I consider it, the more I realise that we, who are still to be found in the land of the living, become, in the eyes of the dead, unreal and, only occasionally, under certain circumstances of light and atmospheric conditions, visible beings."

Austerlitz, unsurprisingly, is a man with no time for watches...

While Sebald plays up the idea of the closeness of the living and the dead, he prefers the reader and the action to be as far apart as possible.  As seen above, the narrator frequently reminds us that Austerlitz is speaking, taking us further away from the action being related.  In fact, at several points, we get third-, or even fourth-hand knowledge, where (for example) the narrator tells us what Austerlitz tells him of a story related by a character named Věra, who in turn is recounting the words of a man called Maximillian...

Another aspect of his style, as you may have noticed above, is his predilection for what I like to call 'Russian Doll' sentences, a mesmerising creation of clause within clause, with detail upon detail piling up until you can barely recall where, or why, the idea started.  I spent a long time translating the few lines above - trust me, I know what I'm talking about!  On top of this, the book consists of a few gigantic paragraphs, an immense wall of words, a decision which makes knowing when to stop reading a rather difficult task.  Where do you stop for the night, when the novel never really stops?

I say 'novel', but Sebald does his best to convince us at times that Austerlitz is anything but.  The book already appears more like a work of non-fiction than a story, and the frequent use of photographs to accompany the people and places described can put a momentary doubt in your mind.  In the first part of the book, especially, we seem so far away from any kind of plot, or even forward momentum, that the average reader will begin to doubt that they exist.  Slowly, inexorably, though, the scales fall from our eyes, and we begin to discern the slow, steady approach of the Nazi horrors.  And why should we rush towards that...

Austerlitz is another superb book that defies description and categorisation, as much as I've tried to do both here today.  It's a work which shows us that the line between fiction and non-fiction is a rather blurred one, and that the past and present aren't quite as distinct as we might think either.  This is a book I recommend you try, and if you do, I'm sure that you, like me, will want to read more of his work.  Add me to the list of Sebald completists ;)

*****
*** An English-language version of Austerlitz, translated by Anthea Bell, is available from Random House

'Was bleibt' ('What Remains') by Christa Wolf (Review)

German Literature Month is in full swing, and as it's still Ladies' Week, I have another review of a book by a female writer for you.  It's actually quite a short work, one you can zip through in an hour or so - its importance though goes far beyond its pages...

*****
Christa Wolf's Was bleibt (What Remains)*** is a novella set in the late 1970s in East Berlin.  A female writer has recently become aware of a disturbing development, where several men are constantly parked outside her house.  Every morning when she opens her curtains, they are there, patiently sitting the day away, not really doing anything, just reminding the writer that Big Brother is watching.

The novella records one day in this period of her life, from waking up to going to bed, an attempt to imprint the events in her mind for the time, far in the future, when she will be able to find the words to document the events clearly.  It's very tempting for the reader to read things into this idea - unsurprising when you consider that the book was written in 1979 but didn't appear until 1990...

It's a story of a society in stasis, a country where life is slowly ebbing away.  Both the writer and the city seem cold and grey.  A fire has died out inside, and as far as the eye can see, it's cold, drab and pitiless.  As the writer goes about her day, we see her looking for warmth and signs of life: she gets involved in a conversation with a woman at the bottle shop; she receives a visit from a young writer who has just been released from prison; and she gets several letters, some more welcome than others.

The observation, while a fairly unobtrusive one for the most part, is intended to wear the writer down mentally:

"Einschüchterung nenne man das, sagte ein Bekannter, der genau Bescheid zu wissen vorgab, aber waren wir eingeschüchtert?"
p.25 (Suhrkamp, 2012)

"Intimidation is what that's called, said an acquaintance of mine, who claimed to know about these things, but were we intimidated?"
(my translation)

The answer, of course, is yes.  The effects of the observation are clear as the writer is obviously stressed and suffering from nightmares.  She's even finding it difficult to write, too busy worrying about what might happen.  A pointless break-in which leaves a bathroom mirror shattered shows that she is right to be concerned...

The writer spends much of her day involved in dialogues in her head - monologues, as she says are pointless.  She finds herself talking and arguing with those who are oppressing her, even if she realises that it's pointless to talk to an unknown entity:

"Und wie anders als kindlich, kindisch, sollte man die unaufhörlichen Gedankenmonologen nennen, auf denen ich mich ertappte und die allzuoft in der absurden Frage endeten: Was wollt ihr eigentlich?  Wieviel ich noch zu lernen hatte!  Eine Institution anreden als sei sie ein Mensch!" (p.18)

"And how, other than childlike, childish, can you describe the constant internal monologues in which I caught myself and which all too often ended in the absurd question: What do you want?  I still had so much to learn!  Talking to an institution as if it were a person!"

Still, you can understand her frustration.  With no real face to her enemy (her observers are very much faceless), she is destined to continually torment herself with thoughts of how to change the unchangeable, to escape the inescapable.

The end of the novella though gives her hope for a brighter future, and it comes, naturally, in the form of the young, the students who talk to her after her reading.  She goes to bed confident that while today is grey and depressing, tomorrow (or the day after that) might just be a little sunnier, a little brighter...

*****
Was bleibt is an interesting little piece, but it's not really one of Wolf's major works.  However, it has a cultural significance which goes far beyond its ninety pages.  Its real importance is to do with the (to use a beloved neo-Germanism) 'shitstorm' which erupted on its publication - this was a book which really shook up the German literary establishment.

Why?  Well, Wolf waited until after reunification to bring it to public attention, despite having written it back in 1979, and many writers and critics saw this as opportunism, even cowardice.  If the book had been released back in the 1970s, some claimed, it may have had a major impact on the way the Stasi carried out their observations.  Instead, they argued, Wolf sat on it to protect her own comfort...

I won't go into all that here, but the German Wikipedia page for Was bleibt goes into the debate in detail.  As a book, Was bleibt is fairly average and of only minor interest.  However, as a document of writing under Communism - and of the culture wars that followed its demise - it's well worth reading :)

*****
***An English-language version (What Remains and Other Stories, translated by Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian) was available from Virago Press - you may have to look for a second-hand copy though.

October 2013 Wrap-Up

October was spent in a relaxed manner, reading and rereading whatever I felt like.  It was also the month in which I notched up the century for the year (and wrote a post celebrating an early bloggerversary!).

And now, in detail...

*****
Total Books Read: 14
Year-to-Date: 108

New: 9

Rereads: 5

From the Shelves: 9
Review Copies: 2

From the Library:2

On the Kindle: 1

Novels: 6
Novellas:4

Short Stories:3
Non-Fiction: 1

Non-English Language: 11 (5 German, 4 Japanese, Polish, Chinese)

In Original Language: 5 (5 German)

Aussie Author Challenge: 2 (5/3)
Japanese Literature Challenge 7: 4 (13/1)

*****
Books reviewed in October were:

1) A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard
2) Bariloche by Andrés Neuman
3) The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante
4) Le Colonel Chabert by Honoré de Balzac
5) Cocaine by Pitigrilli
6) Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall
7) The Swimmers by Joaquín Perez Azaústre
8) Bullfight by Yasushi Inoue
9) Happy Valley by Patrick White
10) My Blood's Country by Fiona Capp

Tony's Turkey for October is: Nothing

Another turkey-free month (it's going to be a lean Christmas at this rate...).

Tony's Recommendation for October is:

Elena Ferrante's The Story of a New Name

There were several good reads in this bunch.  Special mentions go to The Swimmers and Bullfight, and I also enjoyed the second Knausgaard book more than I'd expected.  However, the second part of Ferrante's series was easily the highlight of the month, a book I'd highly recommend :)

*****
November, as regular readers will know, means just one thing - German Literature Month!  Next month's reviews will be full of great G-Lit, with normal service resumed in December :)

'Nichts als Gespenster' ('Nothing but Ghosts') by Judith Hermann (Review)

Welcome, once again, to German Literature Month!  For the third year in a row, Lizzy and Caroline have thrown down the gauntlet of thirty days of German-language books and reviews, and I (as ever) am more than happy to take up the challenge.  The shelves have been tidied up, the Kindle's fully charged, and the German Literature Month bus has come back from the workshop ready to take us all on a magical mystery tour through the corners of the G-Lit world :)

This year's event has female writers as its focus, and while I'm not promising that I'll manage a fifty-fifty split, I am hoping to review a few books by women over the course of the next month - starting today...

*****
Judith Hermann is a writer who first came to my attention when I read Alice for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shadowing in 2012.  Last year, I also tried and enjoyed her first book, Sommerhaus, später (Summerhouse, Later), so it was only a matter of time before I got around to her only other work of fiction.  It's a longer collection, and this time we've left Berlin (mostly) behind - we're on the road...

Nichts als Gespenster (Nothing but Ghosts***) only contains seven stories, but it clocks in at about 320 pages.  While there are a couple of thirty-page stories, the longest, at sixty pages, is actually more of a novella.  The focus is on travel and seeing new places, but Hermann's protagonists are far from being happy travellers.  They are mainly women in their thirties with a lot of stuff to work through - in Hermann's drab, grey world, travel appears to be a sort of therapy.

In 'Acqua Alta', a depressed woman who has just turned thirty travels to Venice to meet up with her parents.  Far from enjoying the trip, she feels a little worse than before, particularly after a chance encounter on a crowded bridge.  'Zuhälter' ('Pimp')  takes place in the Czech spa town of Karlovy Vary, and the narrator once again sets out on a trip she's not really sure she wants to make:

"Vielleicht dachte ich daran, daß ich diesen Moment gerne hinausgezögert hätte, den Moment, bevor jemand die Tür aufmacht und mein Gesicht einen Ausdruck annimmt, um den Ich nicht weiß, aber ich bin mir sicher, daß ich auch daran nicht gedacht habe."
p.158 (Fischer Verlag, 2012)

"Perhaps I was thinking that I would have liked to draw out this moment, the moment before someone opens the door and my face takes on an expression, I don't know what kind, but I'm sure that I wasn't thinking that at all." (My translation)

Travelling is good, but arriving isn't always desirable...

There's a sense of strangeness running through the stories.  'Ruth (Freundinnen)' ('Ruth

(Girlfriends)') is a tale of a bizarre, unconventional one-night stand, where the narrator betrays her closest friend with an arrogant gigolo.  In 'Zuhälter', one of the characters suffers a laughing fit half-way through, one which lasts so long that it goes beyond the funny or hysterical and begins to verge on creepy.  One of the strangest stories though is the last one, 'Die Liebe zu Ari Oskarsson' ('The Love for Ari Oskarsson'), which begins with a trip to the Norwegian town of Tromsø and ends with an unusual night on the tiles...

In addition, the (mainly) first-person narrators don't exactly make it easy for you to immerse yourself in the stories, as many of them aren't very nice.  The voice of 'Wohin des Wegs' ('Where Are You Going?') is a calculating, selfish woman, leading her friend on and trampling over his feelings.  While this is a story where she's looking back at past events, there are enough clues to suggest that this will happen again to her present partner.  The betrayal in 'Ruth (Freundinnen)' is, as discussed, a particularly nasty one, and even in 'Acqua Alta' the seemingly passive protagonist comes across as a selfish, childish woman.

On finishing the collection though, the dominant idea for me was the collection of strong, overbearing men.  The women in the collection, while ostensibly in the spotlight, are there merely to suffer in silence.  There's abuse both physical (a sleazy man on a bridge in 'Acqua Alta', a slap and a spit in 'Zuhälter') and mental (the way Johannes drags his friend to Karlovy Vary in 'Zuhälter' and Raoul's unbearable arrogance in 'Ruth (Freundinnen)').  Even the men who aren't trying to assert their dominance are such large, loud characters (like Jonas in the Icelandic-set story 'Kaltblau' ('Cold-Blue')) that the women fade in their larger-than-life presence.  This female passivity pervades the book, and many readers might be put off by the constant macho displays.

Some of the stories don't really work, and as they're all long, that's an issue.  Some do though, and they're usually the ones where a little hope shines through.  'Kaltblau' is one I enjoyed, a story with a great dual-strand plot and a slight twist at the end.  While the ending is not exactly happy, there is a glimmer of hope.

The title story 'Nichts als Gespenster' ('Nothing but Ghosts') is another I enjoyed, a laid-back tale of a chance encounter in desert-town USA.  Again, we meet a man who at first glance appears to be the typical Hermann alpha male:

"Das, was an Buddy anziehend war, worauf Felix reagierte - Ellen hatte später oft nach einem Wort dafür gesucht und schließlich eines gefunden, das ihr nicht gefiel und das sie dennoch für passend hielt -, war seine Dominanz.  Seine Sicherheit, so etwas wie eine sichtbare Kraft und Konzentration, die ihn umgab, er war ein Wortführer, ohne daß er viel gesprochen hätte." (p.214)

"What was attractive about Buddy, and what Felix reacted to - later Ellen often searched for a word to describe it and finally found one which didn't please her and yet which she found suitable - was his dominance.  His certainty, something like a visible strength and concentration which surrounded him, he was a spokesman, a leader, without actually saying much."

Buddy though is actually one of the more sympathetic men in the book, and his charisma is perhaps what Hermann was trying to portray all along...

I've had a good look around at other reviews, and this book seems to have got a very mixed reception online and in the press.  The disappointment some readers have felt is
probably due to the desire for another Sommerhaus, später - and to the frustration at not getting it.  Nichts als Gespenster is a much darker book, in many ways even more so than Alice.  It's not for everyone, but there are some enjoyable stories here; you just have to look hard enough :)

*****
***There is an English-language version available: Nothing but Ghosts, published by Fourth Estate, translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo