600 people at an alleged €17 a pop, and a piece on the late-night news. That's what you get when you invite Jonathan Safran Foer and Karen Duve to read from their books and talk about not eating animals. I went along for free, because my friend Isabel Bogdan translated Mr Safran Foer's book along with two other lovely and talented translators, Brigitte Jakobeit and Ingo Herzke. But I was one of the small minority in the huge audience who hadn't actually read Eating Animals. I read Anständig essen (Eating Decently) instead.
Karen Duve is a top fiction writer with a sharp sense of humour. You can read her novels This Is Not A Love Song and Rain in English, trans. Anthea Bell (although that took a bit of research to work out - the publishers Bloomsbury seem loathe to mention the fact). I loved her last book, Taxi. And now she's written her first piece of non-fiction, a personal account of her ten-month attempt to eat like a decent human being. She starts off going organic, then vegetarian, then vegan, and finally only eats plant products that don't kill the plant itself when you harvest them, i.e. fruit but no potatoes, peas but no carrots, etc.
Which ties in nicely with Safran Foer's book, presumably. Except that the two of them took rather different approaches to what is essentially the big problem with trying to tell other people what they should and should not eat - the preachiness of it all.
As far as I gathered at last night's reading, JSF (I can't pronounce it so I'll just abbreviate it from now on) tried to tell people what's bad about eating animals without actually telling them what to do about it. Certainly he was very coy in person about how better to persuade people to become vegetarians. It was all about setting a good example and being a better person, not getting on anyone's nerves, doing the right thing, starting with yourself, loving your grandparents, and so forth. Which in itself has a saccharine aftertaste - to me personally - that says, "Hey, you guys just go ahead and destroy the environment and torture poor creatures, I'll be over here with my nut loaf and my clear conscience. Oh, and did I mention my son wrote a letter to David Attenborough?"
Karen Duve, on the other hand, took the more typically German approach - just to labour another cliché. She started with herself, but she's not afraid to get out that moral club and beat you over the head with it until you fall to the ground whimpering and begging for tofu. What she did to take the edge off her preaching was to use her sense of humour.
So the book opens with a device, an external conscience by the name of - wait for it - Jiminy Cricket, Duve's housemate who is a paragon of virtue. Isabel and I aren't sure the woman really exists, but she certainly makes for entertaining reading. Duve does her best to convince Jiminy/Kerstin of what she's doing at each stage, going from suggesting organic farming might be an absolute gift to animals, who get a roof over their head and three square meals a day and a nice stroll around the meadow, to not letting her mow the lawn because it hurts the blades of grass. And she thoroughly enjoys out-consciencing her conscience by eating as ethically as she can.
Or there's a fantastic scene in which Duve visits her family and preaches at them about veganism and factory farming, while her brothers and nephews and so on get bored and walk away and her mother suggests she have a nice drink of milk - it's OK, it's skimmed. She's perfectly aware she's become a food bore, but she milks it (excuse me, I couldn't resist) for all the gags it's worth. She also gently teases other ethical eaters, from the lady in the wholefood shop who lets her water expand in a jug before she drinks it to the rivalling Alpha males in the raw food movement.
In between, of course, there are shocking facts you're probably already half aware of about farming and slaughtering methods, climate change reports, a spot of live animal liberation, interesting stuff about Jainism, and a lot of ethical qualms and indecent cravings. Towards the end, when Duve was living on a diet of peas cooked in coconut milk, the theories became rather addled to my mind. I was reminded of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, forced to eat only peas for a medical experiment, and I clearly recalled an undergraduate seminar in which someone (it may have been me) pointed out with perfect 20-year-old logic that it was no wonder he killed his girlfriend if his diet was so restricted.
Karen Duve didn't kill anything but a few insects, but she does get rather vague about some kind of "creation" that meant all living beings to be equal, and I couldn't help laughing at the accidental lie-detector tests on office plants. All in all, though, the book was rescued by her admissions at the end - that it's not easy eating ethically but she's going to try her best to be as vegan as possible.
All this comes at a time when vegetarianism, we're told, is in fashion. Judging by snippets I picked up at the reading, a lot of people came because of the subject rather than the writers. There were activists in animal costumes outside, calling attention to a demonstration tomorrow. And the guy selling sandwiches in the corridor was keeping rather quiet about his salami baguettes. Add to that the latest farming scandal over contaminated eggs, and we may be witnessing a turning point. Still, it's a hell of a lot easier to be vegetarian in Britain than it is here, and has been for about twenty years.
Things may be looking up, though. The whole publishers and translators kit and caboodle went to a vegan restaurant after JSF had finished signing 3 million autographs. I'm told it was excellent, although I personally have made a vow not to do so much ligging and therefore didn't even attempt to invite myself along, even though it was very conveniently situated on my way home.
I still eat meat, so far. Isabel's given it up, more or less.
Showing posts with label karen duve. Show all posts
Showing posts with label karen duve. Show all posts
Friday, 21 January 2011
Thursday, 25 November 2010
Karen Duve: Weihnachten mit Thomas Müller
Here's another post by my daughter, this time about a children's book written by one of my favourite grown-up writers, Karen Duve. I'm waiting for adolescence to kick in, but until then I shall enjoy every minute of my daughter liking the same writer as me.
Weihnachten mit Thomas Müller is a couple of years old (2003) but hasn't dated. And it's written with Karen Duve's inimitable wry humour, which she uses to take all the characters in the story down a peg or two - and that makes them all the more loveable.
I first read it a month or so ago, drunk. And loved it, even sober. Here's what Elli has to say (I've translated her original post behind the link):
In this gorgeous picture book, "Thomas Müller" isn't a goalkeeper, he's a little teddy bear.
His family has left him behind, sadly. His owner Marc Wortmann dropped him. :(
Presumably when he saw the sneakers with integrated disco lights in the toys and sports store.
As he's sitting all alone by a fountain, a slim black cat comes along and they get talking.
The two of them decide to look for the Wortmann family; after all, Marc must be really missing him at Christmas, mustn't he?
A fun picture book with great illustrations.
Absolutely recommended!
Weihnachten mit Thomas Müller is a couple of years old (2003) but hasn't dated. And it's written with Karen Duve's inimitable wry humour, which she uses to take all the characters in the story down a peg or two - and that makes them all the more loveable.
I first read it a month or so ago, drunk. And loved it, even sober. Here's what Elli has to say (I've translated her original post behind the link):
In this gorgeous picture book, "Thomas Müller" isn't a goalkeeper, he's a little teddy bear.
His family has left him behind, sadly. His owner Marc Wortmann dropped him. :(
Presumably when he saw the sneakers with integrated disco lights in the toys and sports store.
As he's sitting all alone by a fountain, a slim black cat comes along and they get talking.
The two of them decide to look for the Wortmann family; after all, Marc must be really missing him at Christmas, mustn't he?
A fun picture book with great illustrations.
Absolutely recommended!
Tuesday, 12 May 2009
Hey Ms DJ
I've written about the possible risks of writers sharing their record collections before. Yesterday was the ultimate test of my theory though - two writers talking in public and spinning some of their favourite vinyl.
The event was part of a bi-monthly series at the achingly cool HAU2 venue. The writer, musician and radio DJ Thomas Meinecke invites a guest of his choice to raid their record collection and air it in public. This time it was the fantabulous Karen Duve (do click on this link - she really is that grumpily gorgeous in person), author of Taxi, Rain, This Is Not a Love Song... My concern was that finding out about the musical taste of an author I admire might put me off their work. And it did turn out to be a rather bizarre experience.
The two writers are both feminists and both from Hamburg. And they're both vinyl nerds, sharing a passion for picking up records at markets, thrift stores, jumble sales and the like. Meinecke is attempting to revive that (male) teenage tradition of talking for hours on end about records, something most people grow out of. Only he does it with an audience.
The technical set-up was perfect: two decks, a lonely and reviled CD player, and Meinecke's hand firmly on the mixer. They even had a camera set up to project the record covers onto a screen behind them. The audience demographic was about 75% male, the other side of 40 with a high proportion of glasses-wearers. The atmosphere was relaxed - lots of sotto voce commenting while the records were playing, with the occasional question thrown out to the audience. It was not unlike a very friendly and impromptu live version of Desert Island Discs.
The conversation ranged from the days of avant-garde punk in early-80s Hamburg to why there is no word for male fag hags, as Meinecke defines himself, to why dogs howl so tunefully. They occasionally touched on other gender politics issues, where Duve was clearly outshone in terms of well-thought-out ideas. And the music was equally eclectic: Chicago house, 80s Cher, Jeremias Gotthelf set to a dance beat, rather too much Diedrich Diederichsen attempting to sing before he became a cult cultural theorist, Mae West, gobbling turkeys (I had to leave the room at that point), Cash offspring, the mere promise of Rufus Thomas cruelly whisked away from us, bombards and all manner of other delights.
The whole thing was strangely intimate. Despite sitting in a room with 50-odd other people, I felt like I was watching a couple of teenagers in a bedroom, comparing records and trying to outdo each other for sheer strangeness. Their tastes didn't match. Duve likes a lot of things my mother listens to - including the most distressing moment of the evening, a droning Leonhard Cohen cover my mum used to sing along to in the car. And Meinecke just seems to have a hell of a lot of odd records.
But in the end, the atmosphere was forgiving. Because we were sitting on chairs rather than waiting to have our dancing reflexes triggered, it didn't matter at all that I hated Duve's record collection. I came away impressed by both writers as individuals - and I'll be going back again, that's for sure.
The event was part of a bi-monthly series at the achingly cool HAU2 venue. The writer, musician and radio DJ Thomas Meinecke invites a guest of his choice to raid their record collection and air it in public. This time it was the fantabulous Karen Duve (do click on this link - she really is that grumpily gorgeous in person), author of Taxi, Rain, This Is Not a Love Song... My concern was that finding out about the musical taste of an author I admire might put me off their work. And it did turn out to be a rather bizarre experience.
The two writers are both feminists and both from Hamburg. And they're both vinyl nerds, sharing a passion for picking up records at markets, thrift stores, jumble sales and the like. Meinecke is attempting to revive that (male) teenage tradition of talking for hours on end about records, something most people grow out of. Only he does it with an audience.
The technical set-up was perfect: two decks, a lonely and reviled CD player, and Meinecke's hand firmly on the mixer. They even had a camera set up to project the record covers onto a screen behind them. The audience demographic was about 75% male, the other side of 40 with a high proportion of glasses-wearers. The atmosphere was relaxed - lots of sotto voce commenting while the records were playing, with the occasional question thrown out to the audience. It was not unlike a very friendly and impromptu live version of Desert Island Discs.
The conversation ranged from the days of avant-garde punk in early-80s Hamburg to why there is no word for male fag hags, as Meinecke defines himself, to why dogs howl so tunefully. They occasionally touched on other gender politics issues, where Duve was clearly outshone in terms of well-thought-out ideas. And the music was equally eclectic: Chicago house, 80s Cher, Jeremias Gotthelf set to a dance beat, rather too much Diedrich Diederichsen attempting to sing before he became a cult cultural theorist, Mae West, gobbling turkeys (I had to leave the room at that point), Cash offspring, the mere promise of Rufus Thomas cruelly whisked away from us, bombards and all manner of other delights.
The whole thing was strangely intimate. Despite sitting in a room with 50-odd other people, I felt like I was watching a couple of teenagers in a bedroom, comparing records and trying to outdo each other for sheer strangeness. Their tastes didn't match. Duve likes a lot of things my mother listens to - including the most distressing moment of the evening, a droning Leonhard Cohen cover my mum used to sing along to in the car. And Meinecke just seems to have a hell of a lot of odd records.
But in the end, the atmosphere was forgiving. Because we were sitting on chairs rather than waiting to have our dancing reflexes triggered, it didn't matter at all that I hated Duve's record collection. I came away impressed by both writers as individuals - and I'll be going back again, that's for sure.
Wednesday, 18 June 2008
Taxi!
Do you ever feel a sense of loss when you close a book? That you'll really miss even the characters you didn't like? That you'll never come to the book with the same sense of freshness as the first reading? That you might even prefer to just start all over again than to be not reading the book at all?
That's how I feel now I've finished Karen Duve's fantastic new novel, Taxi. It's bloody marvellous. What you have to know is that Duve worked as a taxi driver in Hamburg for 13 years. And that this is a novel about a young woman taxi driver in Hamburg. And that the book is so lovingly done that the actual hardback under the black paper cover is in the exact officially required shade of cream for German taxis (RAL 1015). You may notice I know a lot of odd facts about taxis. That's because I've read this book.
Before I continue, I have a personal admission to make. I have never been a taxi driver in Hamburg. But I did spend a couple of years as a courier in Berlin, which was not dissimilar. I recognised a lot of things - the way the narrator gets the job by batting her eyelids despite her lack of street knowledge, the way the men treat her as that rare creature: a woman, the way people in the job can only ever talk about work, the way the narrator ends up knowing almost only other people from work, the delights of getting jobs via walkie-talkie from a dispatcher who is almost always in a bad mood, the way people refer to each other by their numbers. My number was M-siebzehn. The main differences are that you can't really be a courier at night and that a lot of couriers talk about bikes for hours on end (yawn).
So I was kind of bound to love Taxi. But I'm not alone, and surely only a small percentage of critics have been taxi drivers, or indeed couriers, in the past. The narrator, Alex, is a likeable misanthrope who ends up driving a taxi for want of any other option. She prides herself in her good looks but ends up sleeping all day and driving all night, getting threatened and insulted and propositioned and beaten up by her customers. About every other short chapter is an anecdote about, erm, taxi driving - stingy customers, violent customers, high life, low life, old biddies, young lads, the worthwhile tours, the ultrashort tours, the ones that got away. Of course that reflects the narrator's state of mind - nothing much else exists outside of her work.
Duve pays an incredible amount of attention to detail, really sucking you in.
And then there's Alex's colleagues. She ends up in a dull, exploitative relationship with one of them, talks literature with others ("Reading Peter Altenberg was like swimming in front of a hotel sewage pipe."), getting put down on a daily basis by these incredible misogynists. I'd say I enjoyed reading the chats with her colleagues most of all - they transport a thoroughly pessimistic world view that I wouldn't like to share, but which is very entertaining in a perverse way. Disabled parking spaces are an evil invention, customers should be responsible for good service, socialism is incompatible with primates. Oh, those primates. Alex has her own philosophy, with everyone grouped according to gorilla criteria. It works for her, up to a point.
The plot? Normally I'm big on plot, but here it's kind of secondary. It's there all right, but it's not world-moving. Alex descends into depression, skipping between lovers, the odd thing or two happens to the other taxi drivers and the company, and in the end she's released from her incredible lethargy by an unexpected event. I must say, we couriers were a soap opera in comparison (especially when one of the guys married a nurse and all her workmates got designs on his colleagues). But somehow, I really don't mind that. The book works really well without a mind-blowing plot - the characters are so exaggeratedly drawn that that's enough. I just wanted to read more and more, to find out whether Rüdiger got that proper job or not, whether Udo managed to save the company or not, whether Alex ever managed to finish with Dieter and sort her life out or not.
As far as I'm aware, Duve's first two novels Rain and This is Not a Love Song are available in English, but not her third, The Kidnapped Princess. I haven't read any of them but am thinking of correcting that error toot-sweet. And I think this is a prime candidate for translation too. The only obstacle is that the book is very firmly set in Hamburg. And being about taxi drivers, there are a hell of a lot of street names in it. Perhaps a clever publisher could insert street maps at strategic intervals, Lord of the Rings-style, or maybe put a map of Hamburg on the cover. I can't say it bothered me; I like a bit of local colour, but then I've been to Hamburg a couple of times. So snap it up, clever publishers - before some other passenger jumps the queue and chugs off into the sunset.
But be warned - once you've read this book you will never engage in a friendly chat with a taxi driver ever again. You should have seen the one the day before yesterday...
That's how I feel now I've finished Karen Duve's fantastic new novel, Taxi. It's bloody marvellous. What you have to know is that Duve worked as a taxi driver in Hamburg for 13 years. And that this is a novel about a young woman taxi driver in Hamburg. And that the book is so lovingly done that the actual hardback under the black paper cover is in the exact officially required shade of cream for German taxis (RAL 1015). You may notice I know a lot of odd facts about taxis. That's because I've read this book.
Before I continue, I have a personal admission to make. I have never been a taxi driver in Hamburg. But I did spend a couple of years as a courier in Berlin, which was not dissimilar. I recognised a lot of things - the way the narrator gets the job by batting her eyelids despite her lack of street knowledge, the way the men treat her as that rare creature: a woman, the way people in the job can only ever talk about work, the way the narrator ends up knowing almost only other people from work, the delights of getting jobs via walkie-talkie from a dispatcher who is almost always in a bad mood, the way people refer to each other by their numbers. My number was M-siebzehn. The main differences are that you can't really be a courier at night and that a lot of couriers talk about bikes for hours on end (yawn).
So I was kind of bound to love Taxi. But I'm not alone, and surely only a small percentage of critics have been taxi drivers, or indeed couriers, in the past. The narrator, Alex, is a likeable misanthrope who ends up driving a taxi for want of any other option. She prides herself in her good looks but ends up sleeping all day and driving all night, getting threatened and insulted and propositioned and beaten up by her customers. About every other short chapter is an anecdote about, erm, taxi driving - stingy customers, violent customers, high life, low life, old biddies, young lads, the worthwhile tours, the ultrashort tours, the ones that got away. Of course that reflects the narrator's state of mind - nothing much else exists outside of her work.
Duve pays an incredible amount of attention to detail, really sucking you in.
And then there's Alex's colleagues. She ends up in a dull, exploitative relationship with one of them, talks literature with others ("Reading Peter Altenberg was like swimming in front of a hotel sewage pipe."), getting put down on a daily basis by these incredible misogynists. I'd say I enjoyed reading the chats with her colleagues most of all - they transport a thoroughly pessimistic world view that I wouldn't like to share, but which is very entertaining in a perverse way. Disabled parking spaces are an evil invention, customers should be responsible for good service, socialism is incompatible with primates. Oh, those primates. Alex has her own philosophy, with everyone grouped according to gorilla criteria. It works for her, up to a point.
The plot? Normally I'm big on plot, but here it's kind of secondary. It's there all right, but it's not world-moving. Alex descends into depression, skipping between lovers, the odd thing or two happens to the other taxi drivers and the company, and in the end she's released from her incredible lethargy by an unexpected event. I must say, we couriers were a soap opera in comparison (especially when one of the guys married a nurse and all her workmates got designs on his colleagues). But somehow, I really don't mind that. The book works really well without a mind-blowing plot - the characters are so exaggeratedly drawn that that's enough. I just wanted to read more and more, to find out whether Rüdiger got that proper job or not, whether Udo managed to save the company or not, whether Alex ever managed to finish with Dieter and sort her life out or not.
As far as I'm aware, Duve's first two novels Rain and This is Not a Love Song are available in English, but not her third, The Kidnapped Princess. I haven't read any of them but am thinking of correcting that error toot-sweet. And I think this is a prime candidate for translation too. The only obstacle is that the book is very firmly set in Hamburg. And being about taxi drivers, there are a hell of a lot of street names in it. Perhaps a clever publisher could insert street maps at strategic intervals, Lord of the Rings-style, or maybe put a map of Hamburg on the cover. I can't say it bothered me; I like a bit of local colour, but then I've been to Hamburg a couple of times. So snap it up, clever publishers - before some other passenger jumps the queue and chugs off into the sunset.
But be warned - once you've read this book you will never engage in a friendly chat with a taxi driver ever again. You should have seen the one the day before yesterday...
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