Showing posts with label jan brandt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jan brandt. Show all posts
Tuesday, 19 March 2013
Richter, Brandt, Flensburger, Tempranillo
I have been out drinking with German writers again, this time Nikola Richter and Jan Brandt, possibly predictably so. I'm going out drinking with another German writer tomorrow, and then I shall give myself a rest.
Tuesday, 14 February 2012
Generation Germany Goes UK
Brits! March is the month to catch outstanding German writers on your very own turf! To wit: Clemens Meyer at Edinburgh's Wee Red Bar on 13 March and Leeds Central Library on the 14th. And before that, Jan Brandt at UCL with Joe Dunthorne and Philip Oltermann under the teeth-hurting title of Generation X Reflects on 7 March.
Clemens Meyer is a super-talented writer with a penchant for all things gloomy. You can – no, you should – read my translation of his short stories All the Lights, to discover how excellent writing lifts you out of a gloom. Joe Dunthorne has written an impressive, witty, entertaining short novel about growing up in Wales which has been made into a film. Jan Brandt has written an impressive, witty, entertaining very long novel about growing up in East Frisia which has been somehow made into a live radio play. Philip Oltermann has written a book I haven't read yet about Anglo-German encounters.
I believe Mr Brandt will also be holding public readings in Oxford and Cambridge. And also hanging out with students in London. Mr Meyer will no doubt also be out and about sampling the delights of Edinburgh. So keep your eyes peeled!
Clemens Meyer is a super-talented writer with a penchant for all things gloomy. You can – no, you should – read my translation of his short stories All the Lights, to discover how excellent writing lifts you out of a gloom. Joe Dunthorne has written an impressive, witty, entertaining short novel about growing up in Wales which has been made into a film. Jan Brandt has written an impressive, witty, entertaining very long novel about growing up in East Frisia which has been somehow made into a live radio play. Philip Oltermann has written a book I haven't read yet about Anglo-German encounters.
I believe Mr Brandt will also be holding public readings in Oxford and Cambridge. And also hanging out with students in London. Mr Meyer will no doubt also be out and about sampling the delights of Edinburgh. So keep your eyes peeled!
Thursday, 26 January 2012
Fantasy Launch List
The lovely ladies at Peirene Press recently shared an email they got from the editor Andrew Wille. In it, he praises the way they have been making their mark in their particular niche – European short fiction. And he adds that he's teaching a class of creative writing students and has given them the assignment of creating a fantasy launch list for their own publishing companies.
Now that got me thinking. And thinking, and thinking, and having a thoroughly good time thinking about setting up my own niche publishing house. The niche, as you might guess, would be excellent and innovative contemporary German-language fiction. And here's my very own fantasy launch list, arranged around the theme of coming of age, seeing as I'd be a fledgling publisher:
First off, an old favourite that still hasn't found a publisher in English: Selim Özdogan's Die Tochter des Schmieds. It's a beautiful, evocative and loving portrait of a girl growing up in 1950s rural Turkey. And it's part one of a trilogy, so there'd be lots to look forward to.
Secondly, Olga Grjasnowa's forthcoming Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt. Trauma, loss, survival in Azerbaijan, Germany and Israel, beautifully written and composed. A girl who asks all the right questions but can't find the answers.
Number three would be Jan Brandt's Gegen die Welt. 927 pages of East Frisian gothic, as a friend of mine put it. A boy's youth is an absolute disaster, while the village he comes from lives and breathes in his descriptions.
Finally, number four would be Clemens Meyer's Als wir träumten. Lads living it up in Leipzig, before and after the Wall came down.
All in all, perhaps a tad melancholy. I'd probably have to find some more cheerful books for the next season. What would you put on your fantasy launch lists?
------------
Also, if you happen to work in publishing and have a degree in economics and also speak German, the perfect job opening's come up: senior commissioning editor at Bloomsbury Berlin. Go here to download the details.
Now that got me thinking. And thinking, and thinking, and having a thoroughly good time thinking about setting up my own niche publishing house. The niche, as you might guess, would be excellent and innovative contemporary German-language fiction. And here's my very own fantasy launch list, arranged around the theme of coming of age, seeing as I'd be a fledgling publisher:
First off, an old favourite that still hasn't found a publisher in English: Selim Özdogan's Die Tochter des Schmieds. It's a beautiful, evocative and loving portrait of a girl growing up in 1950s rural Turkey. And it's part one of a trilogy, so there'd be lots to look forward to.
Secondly, Olga Grjasnowa's forthcoming Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt. Trauma, loss, survival in Azerbaijan, Germany and Israel, beautifully written and composed. A girl who asks all the right questions but can't find the answers.
Number three would be Jan Brandt's Gegen die Welt. 927 pages of East Frisian gothic, as a friend of mine put it. A boy's youth is an absolute disaster, while the village he comes from lives and breathes in his descriptions.
Finally, number four would be Clemens Meyer's Als wir träumten. Lads living it up in Leipzig, before and after the Wall came down.
All in all, perhaps a tad melancholy. I'd probably have to find some more cheerful books for the next season. What would you put on your fantasy launch lists?
------------
Also, if you happen to work in publishing and have a degree in economics and also speak German, the perfect job opening's come up: senior commissioning editor at Bloomsbury Berlin. Go here to download the details.
Thursday, 6 October 2011
Jan Brandt: Gegen die Welt
927 pages. 927 pages. I for one do not usually read books this long, because I tend to get bored. So it’s quite an achievement for a book of 927 pages if I even pick it up in the first place. Let alone read it all the way through.
But here comes the full disclosure: I met the author Jan Brandt at a drunken party the year before last. And I remember being quite impressed because after I spouted off high-octane vitriol on some subject or other, he had a similarly vitriolic tale to tell. This, I thought, is a man who knows how to hate, and to package that passion in an entertaining form. Actually I didn’t think that at the time, but I do now. Which is probably like meeting aged ska legend Laurel Aitken still in his cardigan in the ladies’ toilets before a gig and assuming he’s a pervert rather than just not having his glasses on. But that’s another story.
Anyway, to get back to the main pre-strand to this piece, a number of people subsequently told me how amazing Jan Brandt’s book Gegen die Welt was going to be, including the author himself. On which occasion he also predicted that I would end up translating it. We shall see about that. I would certainly relish the challenge, but first a publisher must be found who would relish the financial challenge of getting 927 pages translated. For the time being, I’m very pleased to have translated a sample from the book for your delectation.
So, we have 927 pages and they’re about the inhabitants of a village in East Frisia. I know! It sounds like the world’s dullest book. But it’s so totally not dull, I assure you. Because Brandt has injected his very long narrative with a number of vitalising ingredients. First of all there’s his obvious love for the region’s geography. It’s not there in the form of overly long nature descriptions of the D H Lawrence variety, more in the details of fog or sudden snow, bike rides between fields or the marks the railway has left on the land. Then there’s his contempt for some of his characters, mostly the minor ones like the local businessmen busily undermining each other to the ultimate detriment of the village. And his affection for others such as the main character’s mother and his friend Volker, an obese underage smoker with a pessimistic outlook on life.
And of course the plot. Because far from being an autobiographically based ramble through Daniel Kuper’s youth as one might expect, the novel is held together by a fairly complex storyline. Or several, to be precise. But mainly the one about Daniel, whom we meet on the day he meets Volker, aged about six. A fairly confident little boy, he later falls victim to bullies and is then apparently abducted by aliens. The entire village, indeed the entire world, seems to believe that the Plutonians have landed in a corn circle and kidnapped young Daniel, leaving him semi-naked, bruised and unable to explain what has happened. From then on he’s the village outsider and becomes a scapegoat for all manner of things.
At grammar school he makes new friends and ends up getting drawn into a bullying incident himself, with dire consequences. The boys involved never talk about what happened, but in the course of the book every one of them dies young. These deaths are announced in advance by our omniscient narrator, so I’m not giving too much away here, and yet that just makes for even more compelling reading. The grammar school section is told in a remarkable way, in two parallel strands juxtaposing the boys’ rather banal lives with the more tragic tale of a local train driver – separated by two parallel lines just like a train track. For me, this was writing that doesn’t just play with form for art’s sake – there is a point at which the two strands do meet, and that apparent impossibility is a moment of shock, just like arriving at infinity would be.
The locals’ stories are peppered with pop cultural references, and I particularly enjoyed the ironic references to Dallas. Daniel’s father is the philandering J.R. who runs the village drugstore, constantly competing with his rivals the chemist and the supermarket manager. Then there are the biblical references, the village going by the name of Jericho and rather a lot of religion going on there. Plus the closeness to the work of Uwe Johnson, particularly Mutmassungen über Jakob, which I haven’t actually read but is set in a place called Jerichow. Lots of heavy metal music, and I also fancied a spot of David Foster Wallace in there too, what with the complexity and rather a lot of Jeopardy! – including as a metaphor. And illustrations of adverts and posters. And smatterings of Greek and Latin. And paranoid letters to the chancellor. And long lists of people or groceries that are actually a joy to read. And every time a car appears we’re told its make and vintage. And I’m sure I’ve missed a great many more references. Manic realism, the author seems to call it. In fact the literary world that is Jericho is so saturated that he’s provided a useful reference work online.
It’s not a novel that makes you want to move to the countryside. The atmosphere in oppressive and aggressive, especially as Daniel gets older and the swastika raises its ugly head. As the details settled in my mind, I thought I made out a political message about what people in Germany are willing to believe in order to shift the blame for their own extremism. But maybe I didn’t. It could just be an attempt to document very ordinary lives in an un-boring way. Strangely though, while I normally can’t relate to less ambitious novels about growing up in obscure corners of West Germany – not having grown up in any corner of Germany myself – I found Gegen die Welt had a broader appeal.
Masterfully, the novel closes with a section told from Volker’s perspective as an adult. But rather than coyly tying up all the loose strands – which it does to some extent – it throws a whole new light on other aspects. And it ends suddenly with
But here comes the full disclosure: I met the author Jan Brandt at a drunken party the year before last. And I remember being quite impressed because after I spouted off high-octane vitriol on some subject or other, he had a similarly vitriolic tale to tell. This, I thought, is a man who knows how to hate, and to package that passion in an entertaining form. Actually I didn’t think that at the time, but I do now. Which is probably like meeting aged ska legend Laurel Aitken still in his cardigan in the ladies’ toilets before a gig and assuming he’s a pervert rather than just not having his glasses on. But that’s another story.
Anyway, to get back to the main pre-strand to this piece, a number of people subsequently told me how amazing Jan Brandt’s book Gegen die Welt was going to be, including the author himself. On which occasion he also predicted that I would end up translating it. We shall see about that. I would certainly relish the challenge, but first a publisher must be found who would relish the financial challenge of getting 927 pages translated. For the time being, I’m very pleased to have translated a sample from the book for your delectation.
So, we have 927 pages and they’re about the inhabitants of a village in East Frisia. I know! It sounds like the world’s dullest book. But it’s so totally not dull, I assure you. Because Brandt has injected his very long narrative with a number of vitalising ingredients. First of all there’s his obvious love for the region’s geography. It’s not there in the form of overly long nature descriptions of the D H Lawrence variety, more in the details of fog or sudden snow, bike rides between fields or the marks the railway has left on the land. Then there’s his contempt for some of his characters, mostly the minor ones like the local businessmen busily undermining each other to the ultimate detriment of the village. And his affection for others such as the main character’s mother and his friend Volker, an obese underage smoker with a pessimistic outlook on life.
And of course the plot. Because far from being an autobiographically based ramble through Daniel Kuper’s youth as one might expect, the novel is held together by a fairly complex storyline. Or several, to be precise. But mainly the one about Daniel, whom we meet on the day he meets Volker, aged about six. A fairly confident little boy, he later falls victim to bullies and is then apparently abducted by aliens. The entire village, indeed the entire world, seems to believe that the Plutonians have landed in a corn circle and kidnapped young Daniel, leaving him semi-naked, bruised and unable to explain what has happened. From then on he’s the village outsider and becomes a scapegoat for all manner of things.
At grammar school he makes new friends and ends up getting drawn into a bullying incident himself, with dire consequences. The boys involved never talk about what happened, but in the course of the book every one of them dies young. These deaths are announced in advance by our omniscient narrator, so I’m not giving too much away here, and yet that just makes for even more compelling reading. The grammar school section is told in a remarkable way, in two parallel strands juxtaposing the boys’ rather banal lives with the more tragic tale of a local train driver – separated by two parallel lines just like a train track. For me, this was writing that doesn’t just play with form for art’s sake – there is a point at which the two strands do meet, and that apparent impossibility is a moment of shock, just like arriving at infinity would be.
The locals’ stories are peppered with pop cultural references, and I particularly enjoyed the ironic references to Dallas. Daniel’s father is the philandering J.R. who runs the village drugstore, constantly competing with his rivals the chemist and the supermarket manager. Then there are the biblical references, the village going by the name of Jericho and rather a lot of religion going on there. Plus the closeness to the work of Uwe Johnson, particularly Mutmassungen über Jakob, which I haven’t actually read but is set in a place called Jerichow. Lots of heavy metal music, and I also fancied a spot of David Foster Wallace in there too, what with the complexity and rather a lot of Jeopardy! – including as a metaphor. And illustrations of adverts and posters. And smatterings of Greek and Latin. And paranoid letters to the chancellor. And long lists of people or groceries that are actually a joy to read. And every time a car appears we’re told its make and vintage. And I’m sure I’ve missed a great many more references. Manic realism, the author seems to call it. In fact the literary world that is Jericho is so saturated that he’s provided a useful reference work online.
It’s not a novel that makes you want to move to the countryside. The atmosphere in oppressive and aggressive, especially as Daniel gets older and the swastika raises its ugly head. As the details settled in my mind, I thought I made out a political message about what people in Germany are willing to believe in order to shift the blame for their own extremism. But maybe I didn’t. It could just be an attempt to document very ordinary lives in an un-boring way. Strangely though, while I normally can’t relate to less ambitious novels about growing up in obscure corners of West Germany – not having grown up in any corner of Germany myself – I found Gegen die Welt had a broader appeal.
Masterfully, the novel closes with a section told from Volker’s perspective as an adult. But rather than coyly tying up all the loose strands – which it does to some extent – it throws a whole new light on other aspects. And it ends suddenly with
Monday, 3 January 2011
Things I Am Looking Forward To in 2011
One of my favourite German rituals is the New Year's Eve tradition of "lead-pouring". You take little plugs of lead (actually aluminium these days), melt them down over a candle, and then pour them into cold water to see what shape they make and predict your fate for the coming year. Of course it's all in the interpretation, but this year I got a saxophone. Make of that what you will. I also had a fortune cookie that told me to "be patient and optimistic" - and chose not to apply that to my love life.
There a few German books I'm really looking forward to in 2011, in two different areas.
Firstly, in the patient and optimistic sector, two debuts of which I have no idea when they'll be coming out: novels by Jan Brandt and Sebastian Polmans. Brandt is a geezer about town I vaguely know, alway impeccably dressed and surrounded by hordes of women, and I'm curious to find out whether his writing's any good. So far I've heard one short story and was impressed - but found it slightly too smooth. The book's allegedly being published by Dumont. And Polmans was my favourite at the Open Mike competition a while back. He seems to write with a spirit of adventure and excitement, so again I'm very curious as to what his debut with Suhrkamp will bring us.
Secondly, I predict a major anti-chauvinist backlash against the likes of Thilo Sarrazin, in fiction and non-fiction. The most obvious title in this category is the essay volume Manifest der Vielen, edited by Hilal Sezgin and featuring pieces by all sorts of sensible writers. The publishers promise writing about their lives in Germany, home and identity, being a Muslim or a non-Muslim, focusing on critical analysis and personal stories rather than terms like migrants, Muslims, Germans, etc. Out in February from Blumenbar.
And after the exhilarating presence of "migrant writers" from all sorts of places all over last year's shortlists and awards (with Melinda Nadj Abonji taking almost every prize going for her beautiful but plot-disadvantaged novel about Hungarian-Serbian immigrants to Switzerland), this year promises more. Zsuzsa Bánk, feted back in 2002 for her debut Der Schwimmer, returns with a big fat novel about Hungarians and Germans growing up together, Die hellen Tage. Out in February from Fischer. And the same month sees the long-awaited follow-up to My Official Favourite German Book Ever, Selim Özdogan's Die Tochter des Schmieds. Called Heimstraße 52 (Aufbau), it follows the protagonist Gül and her family from Turkey to Germany, where Özdogan shows typical dramas, childhoods and working lives in Germany's industrial boomtime. Think Small Island applied to Germany. I love it already, and I think 2011 will be the year when writers whose parents came from abroad but who grew up in Germany, Austria and Switzerland themselves really come into their own. The postmigrant generation in your face, dude.
On the translation front, I'm looking forward to all sorts of goodies. First and foremost Helene Hegemann's Axolotl Roadkill in English, translated by - er, me. Out in April from Constable & Robinson. Then my translation of My Second Favourite German Book Ever, Inka Parei's The Shadowboxing Woman, published I'm not quite sure when by Seagull Books. Then I have two gorgeous young adult/children's titles by the delightfully talented Rusalka Reh coming out with AmazonCrossing in May and August.
Translations on the "to be reviewed" pile include Thomas Pletzinger's celebrated novel Funeral for a Dog, translated no doubt extremely well by Ross Benjamin, and Daniel Glattauer's Love Virtually, an internet romance romp rendered into English by husband-and-wife team Katharina Bielenberg and Jamie Bulloch. Both spring releases, I believe. I'm looking forward to two short books brought to us by Peirene Press - Matthias Politycki's Next World Novella (trans. Anthea Bell) and Austrian Alois Hotschnig's Maybe This Time, translated by my buddy Tess Lewis. Oh, and I don't know if it's actually coming out this year or not, but Open Letter are doing Benjamin Stein's jewel The Canvas.
Plus, 2011 sees the first books from the wonderful people at And Other Stories, who have confirmed two titles so far from Iosi Havilio (Argentina) and Juan Pablo Villalobos (Mexico). And who knows, maybe they'll discover a German writer to share with the English-speaking world as well. You certainly need to check them out if you haven't already.
So, join me in exercising patience and optimism, and let us all play our saxophones for fantastic German books in 2011.
There a few German books I'm really looking forward to in 2011, in two different areas.
Firstly, in the patient and optimistic sector, two debuts of which I have no idea when they'll be coming out: novels by Jan Brandt and Sebastian Polmans. Brandt is a geezer about town I vaguely know, alway impeccably dressed and surrounded by hordes of women, and I'm curious to find out whether his writing's any good. So far I've heard one short story and was impressed - but found it slightly too smooth. The book's allegedly being published by Dumont. And Polmans was my favourite at the Open Mike competition a while back. He seems to write with a spirit of adventure and excitement, so again I'm very curious as to what his debut with Suhrkamp will bring us.
Secondly, I predict a major anti-chauvinist backlash against the likes of Thilo Sarrazin, in fiction and non-fiction. The most obvious title in this category is the essay volume Manifest der Vielen, edited by Hilal Sezgin and featuring pieces by all sorts of sensible writers. The publishers promise writing about their lives in Germany, home and identity, being a Muslim or a non-Muslim, focusing on critical analysis and personal stories rather than terms like migrants, Muslims, Germans, etc. Out in February from Blumenbar.
And after the exhilarating presence of "migrant writers" from all sorts of places all over last year's shortlists and awards (with Melinda Nadj Abonji taking almost every prize going for her beautiful but plot-disadvantaged novel about Hungarian-Serbian immigrants to Switzerland), this year promises more. Zsuzsa Bánk, feted back in 2002 for her debut Der Schwimmer, returns with a big fat novel about Hungarians and Germans growing up together, Die hellen Tage. Out in February from Fischer. And the same month sees the long-awaited follow-up to My Official Favourite German Book Ever, Selim Özdogan's Die Tochter des Schmieds. Called Heimstraße 52 (Aufbau), it follows the protagonist Gül and her family from Turkey to Germany, where Özdogan shows typical dramas, childhoods and working lives in Germany's industrial boomtime. Think Small Island applied to Germany. I love it already, and I think 2011 will be the year when writers whose parents came from abroad but who grew up in Germany, Austria and Switzerland themselves really come into their own. The postmigrant generation in your face, dude.
On the translation front, I'm looking forward to all sorts of goodies. First and foremost Helene Hegemann's Axolotl Roadkill in English, translated by - er, me. Out in April from Constable & Robinson. Then my translation of My Second Favourite German Book Ever, Inka Parei's The Shadowboxing Woman, published I'm not quite sure when by Seagull Books. Then I have two gorgeous young adult/children's titles by the delightfully talented Rusalka Reh coming out with AmazonCrossing in May and August.
Translations on the "to be reviewed" pile include Thomas Pletzinger's celebrated novel Funeral for a Dog, translated no doubt extremely well by Ross Benjamin, and Daniel Glattauer's Love Virtually, an internet romance romp rendered into English by husband-and-wife team Katharina Bielenberg and Jamie Bulloch. Both spring releases, I believe. I'm looking forward to two short books brought to us by Peirene Press - Matthias Politycki's Next World Novella (trans. Anthea Bell) and Austrian Alois Hotschnig's Maybe This Time, translated by my buddy Tess Lewis. Oh, and I don't know if it's actually coming out this year or not, but Open Letter are doing Benjamin Stein's jewel The Canvas.
Plus, 2011 sees the first books from the wonderful people at And Other Stories, who have confirmed two titles so far from Iosi Havilio (Argentina) and Juan Pablo Villalobos (Mexico). And who knows, maybe they'll discover a German writer to share with the English-speaking world as well. You certainly need to check them out if you haven't already.
So, join me in exercising patience and optimism, and let us all play our saxophones for fantastic German books in 2011.
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