Hooray for Juli Zeh, Ilja Trojanow and Benjamin Stein!

There's been a great deal of hullaballoo in Germany recently about Urheberrecht. Which is like copyright only the rules are slightly different, I believe. First a musician-cum-writer gave an angry radio interview about people expecting something for nothing on the internet. There followed statements by groups such as scriptwriters, crime writers, and so on. Then several thousand writers signed an appeal against alleged calls to abolish Urheberrecht. I'd have linked to it except it keeps making my browser crash. That might (but probably doesn't) have something to do with the fact that anonymous activists got annoyed with them and published a list of their email addresses. Thus making the anonymous activists look terribly big and clever, but perhaps not helping the debate along hugely. A number of individual writers then presumably felt threatened by the nasty electronic media and wrote rather silly pieces about how the net is ruled by semi-illiterate idiots. Then came the counter-appeals, and so on and so forth.

I'd been holding out on the subject, to be frank, because it's a very complicated issue that I feel is something for people to work out who understand intellectual property law, i.e. lawyers. And although I was encouraged to sign the mass appeal I decided not to. I can understand why German writers are running scared, looking at the record industry's rapid decline transformation. I'm an old-fashioned girl but I know musicians and even record sellers who download tracks illegally. And then imagine you've just woken up to the existence of the e-book, like basically all of Germany, and think what a shock you'd get. Eavesdropping on countless Facebook conversations, I could see that even those writers who are actually on Facebook and thus, like, totally down with the kids, are worried about pirated electronic copies of their books.

The only point of my own I have to make, which has no doubt been made before but after a while I stopped following the debate, is that I know musicians now make up for some of the losses caused by illegal downloads through live appearances. And they're something that many writers shine at too, and which can already earn them a lot decent amount of money once they hit that point of people wanting to pay to see them. Especially in Germany, where they're paid as a matter of course. So calm down, will you?

Well they already have, but I still wanted to draw your attention to three writers who are saying things I think make sense. First of all came Benjamin Stein in his blog Turmsegler. He pointed out that criticism of the evil middle-men is exaggerated, because writers need someone to do their editing, printing, marketing, royalties accounting, and so on. And that customers don't necessarily want to get creative content for free, as the major success of iTunes proves - they want things to be reasonably priced and simple to get hold of. Yes, he says, reform Urheberrecht to reflect what the internet enables us to do now, but don't abolish it.

Then Juli Zeh was interviewed along with her publisher Klaus Schöffling (love german books German publisher of the year 2011!). That was in last week's issue of the weekly Die Zeit. And here, Zeh says that high pricing of e-books encourages illegal copying, while Schöffling says, well we're not a big enough company to start lowering the prices. A strange argument, considering he also says they only sold 270 electronic copies of a hardcover that broke the 20,000 margin. But neither of them are keen on punishing individuals for ripping off e-books.

And then Zeh - who's a lawyer, hooray! - and Ilja Trojanow had a terribly sensible piece in Sunday's FAZ. They point out that piracy is so far no real threat to German writers and they add some realistic calculations to the mix. They remind us that nobody's seriously suggested abolishing Urheberrecht anyway, no, not even the digital Blackbeards of the Pirate Party. And they suggest that the upshot of all this focus could be yet more surveillance on the internet.

Oddly enough, all three of these authors have made it into English. Benjamin Stein's novel The Canvas (trans. Brian Zumhagen) is coming out any day now from Open Letter Books - a tiny weeny publishing company that has done its bit on the innovative e-book pricing front, incidentally. Ilja Trojanow made it big, big, big with his Collector of Worlds (trans. Will Hobson), and Juli Zeh's latest English translation (by the wondrous Sally-Ann Spencer) is The Method - about a meddling state. My guess is that Stein's just incredibly internet-savvy - being one of the very, very few German writers who even blogs, and an IT bod aside from that (and apologies for these parentheses inside dashes, but I'd just like to emphasize my belief that a lot of German writers and indeed readers are still very shy of the internet in general, which is something I'll rant about on another occasion) - and Trojanow and Zeh have seen the future in the UK and US book industry and aren't afraid of it.

Certainly the whole debate hasn't shown many people in a good light. Now the political parties are gradually launching new position papers on intellectual property rights and the internet, safe in the knowledge that thousands of voters really are interested. Of course that's all much less sexy than signing an appeal - on a website to boot.

Films!

Have I ever mentioned my fantastic plan for avoiding reading the classics? The plan was to watch the movie versions instead and appear learned and well-read in polite conversation without having to do the dusty book thing. Except I never got round to it.

Should you be the other way inclined and never get round to reading contemporary German literature, you're in luck. Because right now, for some reason, German cinemas are a veritable carnival of literary adaptations! So sneak your favourite beverage into your local movie theatre (I find those mini bottles of bubbly ideal for this purpose) and pretend you're au fait with the literary now generation at the next party you attend.

Start off with Juli Zeh's Schilf, a top-flight clever detective-cum-physics story available in the UK as Dark Matter and in the US as In Free Fall. Next up is Glück, based on a short story by Ferdinand von Schirach - a love story you know's going to end tragically, taken from the collection called Crime in English. Not based on the newest of books but still contemporary, Russendisko (Russian Disco in the English translation) gives Vladimir Kaminer's Russians in post-89 Berlin tales the movie treatment. And then there's Daniel Kehlmann's Ruhm, an adaptation of the interlocking stories called Fame in English.

I haven't really been following the critical reception but you know how everybody hates literary adaptations. Nor have I seen any of the films. One adaptation I did see though was Faust, a bit of a waste for me on the classic adaptations front because I did of course read the play about a hundred years ago. But it was great arty fun, full of grunts and silences and bits that made you think you need new glasses. I'd certainly recommend it.

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Longlist

The good people of Booktrust have announced the longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. And there are three German contenders out of the fifteen:

Daniel Kehlmann's Fame, trans. Carol Brown Janeway
Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation, trans. Susan Bernofsky
and Juli Zeh's Dark Matter, trans. Christine Lo.

As they point out, there are a lot of independent publishers on the list, including the delightful Peirene Press who only do translated titles. This is a great way to call attention to their work, but it also goes to show how few major publishers bother with translations nowadays. I know there are editors at larger houses who long to do more translated fiction, and I hope the increasing attention going to international writing gradually puts them in a stronger position to do so.

The shortlist is out on 11 April, and the winning writer and translator will be announced on 26 May. They get 5000 pounds each and lots of little stickers on their book. And a magnum of champagne - not sure if they have to share that or there's one each.

Juli Zeh Meets Her Translators

I've written before about the regular get-togethers between German writers and their international translators at the Straelen translation house. This time around it was Juli Zeh, who met up with eight translators of her sort-of science-fiction sort-of novel Corpus Delicti. English-speakers will be pleased to hear that unlike last time, when the book in question was Uwe Tellkamp's Der Turm, there was an English translator among them: Sally-Ann Spencer - hooray!

You can see them all looking gorgeous here. And the regional press also took an interest, with an informative article in the Rheinische Post and a fun one in Der Westen. What I find particularly interesting is Zeh's relaxed attitude to her translators changing things - particularly titles and characters' names - "to take the novel all the way to their own countries."

And although these events are obviously really fantastic for the translators involved - imagine the chance to spend a week working on a book with the writer herself at arm's reach - I like to think the authors get something out of them too. Not just the reassurance that the translators really will have understood the book, but also a lot of new knowledge about all the countries it'll be appearing in.

I'm certainly looking forward to reading Sally-Ann's translation - not least because I once met Juli Zeh and mistook her for someone else. She was very gracious about it all.

Juli Zeh: Dark Matter / In Free Fall

The most striking thing about this translation – although not necessarily an unusual phenomenon – is that the title is completely different to the original. In German, Juli Zeh’s third novel is named Schilf after its detective character. Meaning literally ‘reeds’, the word is fabulously misleading. Whereas Dark Matter takes us in a very different direction, pointing us at the two physicists who open the book and instantly suggesting a thriller. In the States, meanwhile, it’s coming out as In Free Fall.

I started reading the book as a precisely observed story of two claustrophobically close friends who have chosen different directions in life. Sebastian is married and has settled for a staid career teaching physics at a provincial university and defending a near-dead theory in his free time. While Oskar is a high-flying bohemian looking for the physics to end all physics in Geneva. Zeh treats us to their tense conversations, always presenting the science and philosophy in comprehensible portions. It’s a beautifully unhurried opening, a whole forty pages dedicated to dinner with Sebastian’s family.

And then – Juli Zeh turns up the pressure. Sebastian is at the end of his tether, a dead black cat by the side of the road an all too clear indication that something has gone badly wrong. His son has been kidnapped and he is told, “Dabbeling must go”. So he kills a man.

And then? That’s when the book started to disappoint me. From then on, the camera zooms away from the desperate Sebastian and into the police station. Yes, the characters are beautifully done, a valkyrie of a detective by the name of Rita Skura and the shambling and once eponymous Schilf as far from classic whodunit fodder as you can imagine. Yes, they solve the crime almost by accident and we find out more about their inner and private lives than about their criminological methods. And yes, we get something like closure at the end.

But I was simply more interested in the two physicists than I was in the crime. I didn’t want Dark Matter to be a crime novel. I wanted to read about Oskar and Sebastian and resented any time devoted to Schilf and his ex-pupil Skura. I wanted to see whose theory would win out, who would gain the moral upper hand in their fascinating relationship. And although we do get all this at some point, Juli Zeh makes us wait.

Christine Lo’s translation certainly reflects the very high register of the original, which is not always to my taste. In Zeh’s world there are no butterfly collectors, only lepidopterists, and in Lo’s translation all the pigeons are doves, no doubt fittingly enough. But I did love all the birds and wildlife dotted through the story, a nice gimmick that adds Hitchcockian depth to the narrative.

So it’s a not really crime novel that is too much of a crime novel – probably what’s called “intelligent crime writing” and similar to her debut Eagles and Angels, also available in English. Exploring guilt and innocence and all that. You can catch Juli Zeh in conversation with crime writer David Guttridge at the book’s launch at the London Goethe Institut on 11 March.