Emerging German Writers at Words without Borders

They asked me to guest-edit an issue of Words without Borders showcasing emerging German writers. I nearly burst, I was so proud and excited. For years I'd been fantasizing about putting together an equivalent to Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, only with Germans. The power! The influence! The delights of including certain favourites and excluding writers who've blanked me at parties!

And then: Jesus, it was hard. Try choosing only ten writers, of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. As in, only ten writers you want the whole world to read. Also, try choosing ten pieces of writing that are varied and reflect different aspects of a "national literature" (let's not go there) and are also serious and fun to read and outstandingly good and grab you by the throat and shake you and work on their own and in combination. Thankfully, they let me choose only German writing rather than German-language writing from Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Luxemburg, and wherever. So only about half the total volume to sieve through.

I define the nebulous "emerging" as not yet world famous and with a maximum of two book-length publications. Some of the writers haven't put any books out yet. For poets I was looking for people who haven't yet been translated. I define "German writers" as people who write in German in Germany, possibly coming from elsewhere, or come from Germany and write in German elsewhere. There's a fair amount of moving around the world among the authors in the issue – I didn't check anyone's passports.

One thing very quickly went out the window: an age limit. Because an age limit is a ridiculous restriction that punishes writers who've been doing other things with their lives before getting published and rewards writers who take the straight path. Another thing was that I sought help and advice on poetry, because I know very little indeed about poetry.

Anyway, look upon their works ye mighty, and despair. Maybe no one will remember them in ten years' time or maybe they'll be famous the world over. These are my emerging German writers:

Finn-Ole Heinrich
Olga Grjasnowa
Stephanie Bart
Marianna Salzmann
Bettina Suleiman
Simone Kornappel
Isabelle Lehn
Francis Nenik
Noemi Schneider
Deniz Utlu

Thanks to my fellow translators Amanda DeMarco, Jake Schneider and Julie Winter, and to the lovely editors at Words without Borders. The issue also features a special on writers from Burundi, which you should also read. Also I wrote an introduction. Enjoy. I am available for interviews.

RealFiktionen

A while ago, I was thinking (aloud) about page-to-stage adaptations of German novels, a fairly popular phenomenon, and about ownership of texts and how writers (and their descendants) react to meddling by translators and directors. And now there's a symposium in Berlin on this very subject: RealFiktionen. Last night I went along to the second of their three events, excited to see my friends, the writers Deniz Utlu and Olga Grjasnowa, talking about their experiences of having their novels adapted for the stage.

The evening began, however, with Wolfram Lotz and Hannes Becker, two young men who've been getting a whole lotta hype recently. And they were sexy and silly and made all the girls laugh, but I found they tested the patience of the older members of the audience, myself included, who seemed to have a different sense of comic timing, let's say. Still, I did actually love, love, love their 27 Demands for The Theatre, for its almost achievable utopianism and for addressing the horribleness of hierarchies. (I recently spent a day in a foreign country with some German theatre people, purely by coincidence, and was amazed that the dramaturg ("the guy who re-writes the plays," said the electrician) refused to sit at the same table as the technical staff and didn't exchange a single word with them. What an idiot.)

And then came the podium discussion with Olga and Deniz and the directors Nurkan Erpulat and Hakan Savaş Mican, who are staging their respective novels at the Maxim-Gorki-Theater (which the NY Times says is "leading an immigrant vanguard", but hey, I suppose they have to write something eye-catching in the headlines, even if it makes you feel like you're stranded in the seventies). And the discussion, while it could have been tighter, was interesting for several reasons.

First of all, the writers were both totally laid-back about having their novels adapted. Maybe because they know the directors and trust them, or maybe because they recognize that the stage versions are going to be radically different to the originals anyway and so can relax into the whole experience. Olga Grjasnowa actually said she prefers the play of her first novel to the book; there's one scene that simply works better, for her. Novels are finite, nailed down to the page and can't be changed, while plays can come out differently at every performance, have the potential for constant evolution. I don't know whether that means constant enhancement; I can imagine there are nights when the actors are more jaded than others, but what do I know. And she pointed out that publishing a novel means surrendering control over its interpretation because every reader understands it differently; writers can only hope readers will even finish their books. Plus, the editor and the publisher and even/especially the sales reps have the power to cut entire characters and plot strands (although maybe that changes as writers become more established and have greater punching power). So a director reaching in and wrenching out the "soul" of your novel, as Hakan Savaş Mican put it, is only one in a long line of interventions.

Interestingly, Deniz Utlu sees things differently when he writes directly for the stage, because there he has more of a vision for his work in the context. But everyone on the panel agreed that there are two huge differences between page and stage: time and space. In a novel, everything happens in the reader's imagination and a writer can slow down or speed up time, focus on a hummingbird's wings for two pages or have characters age within a paragraph. And theatre in particular has to find a way to compensate for that. The example given was Elyas and his Uncle Cemal in Utlu's Die Ungehaltenen, who in the novel meet up over and over and sit and drink tea in companionable silence – something the director said he doesn't want to recreate in real time (Lotz and Becker might, though), so he has to condense those encounters, which are important for the respective characters.

And the space element is the fact that there are real people up there acting things out, moving closer and further away from each other and the audience. What they didn't mention was sound; I think music is not unimportant either, but maybe that's more of a film thing. Or lighting, or stage design and costumes. What I didn't realize is how theatre people go about making novels into plays, sometimes: according to Nurkan Erpulat they all read the book (actors and designers and directors and assistants; Lotz and Becker say the technical staff do/should too, but maybe they don't, I don't know) and then they go into a rehearsal space together and think about how to make a play out of it, and only after a few weeks does anything get written down, I think by the dramaturg but I'm not sure, and even then that initial version is still very flexible. 

It was fun to listen to directors talking; they seem to be a different species to writers. At one point Nurkan Erpulat pretended to be a moderator, intoning an inane but not uninteresting question into the microphone, and the best moment of all was when Hakan Savaş Mican proclaimed it impossible to adapt a novel for the stage. I'm very much looking forward to his production of Deniz Utlu's novel now, what with my translator's realistic love for performing impossible feats.

Chamisso Prize to Fatah, Grjasnowa, Kordic

Literary award of the day number two is the Chamisso Prize, which goes to "authors writing in the German language whose literature is affected by cultural changes". They changed the definition in 2012, apparently, and again I didn't notice; it was previously awarded to writers who wrote in German but had a different native language. I'm pleased they've made the change. Very pleased, in fact, because I hope it will shift the conversation from the lazy "So you grew up speaking Bulgarian, huh? How did you end up falling in love with German?" to something more interesting and possibly less pigeon-holing. 

Anyway, this year the main prize goes to Sherko Fatah. Hooray! Martin Chalmers' English version of The Dark Ship comes out from Seagull Books next month and you should definitely read it. Very exciting and political and well written. Some cultural changes occur. Fatah gets a nice €15,000 prize and will no doubt take place in the award's excellent programme in schools and elsewhere.

They have two prizes for emerging writers, which they've awarded this year to Olga Grjasnowa (All Russians Love Birch Trees, tr. Eva Bacon) and Martin Kordic (Wie ich mir das Glück vorstelle). I bet they're both happy about getting a €7000 boost to their bank accounts.

I'm happy too. 

Olga Grjasnowa: Die juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe

Here is a novel written exactly and deliberately the way you’re not supposed to write a novel. And yet, or maybe for that very reason, it works, and it had me racing through it at breakneck speed, twice over. Which is why I wrote ages and ages ago that I couldn’t wait to review it and then made you wait all this time – because after first reading it I knew I wanted to read it again so I didn’t write any notes. And now I’ve read it again and yes, it still does everything wrong but there seems to be a little more system to it, and yes, it still works.

I’m most delighted, of course, by a scene very reminiscent of my evening out with Olga Grjasnowa while she was working on the novel. Chapter minus twenty-nine, in case you’re interested. But regardless of that, this is very possibly one of those books that you have to read if you’re interested in the future of writing or indeed non-heteronormative sexuality in Azerbaijan. Because as the title suggests (it translates as: the legal blurriness of a marriage) it’s about relationships, mainly between Leyla and her husband Altay but also between Leyla, Altay and Leyla’s girlfriend Jonoun in Berlin. And then a little bit between Altay and another man in Baku, Farid.

Now look at me avoiding certain words. Those words are: Muslim, Jewish, ex-Soviet, American, Israeli, Azerbaijani, gay, lesbian, bisexual, homosexual, love. The words are contained in the book but the characters don’t apply them to themselves.

Leyla is a ballet dancer from Baku. Altay is a psychologist from Baku. They get married in Moscow because they get along well and they want to get their parents off their backs. Then they move to Berlin to get Moscow off their backs – Leyla the pressure of the Bolshoi, Altay the pressure of his homophobic colleagues. Jonoun comes from all over the place, would like to be an artist, and works behind a bar in Berlin. Normally, it’s the reviewer’s task to compile this type of pithy plot and character descriptions, but in this book the author does it for us. Grjasnowa’s prose is swarming with short, sharp psychological characterizations and one-liners. She tells more than she shows, and her omniscient narrator has a dark, cynical sense of humour.

But she gets away with all that because there are things she shows, and those things are less about her characters than about the world around them. The novel is cleverly structured around a central episode, chapter zero, which is placed at the beginning of the book. Leyla has been arrested in Baku for illegal car racing and is tortured by the police. It’s a scary thing to start with, and the device of singling out that chapter rather than letting it stand for itself might seem heavy-handed if it weren’t for the fact that half of this book is about a thoroughly corrupt and oppressive regime. If you’re going to write a novel set partly in Azerbaijan there’s not much point in being delicate about it.

So before chapter zero, chronologically, comes the countdown to it, the story of Leyla growing up and to some extent Jonoun and Altay too, and the story of Leyla and Jonoun meeting and Jonoun moving in and moving out again, and Leyla going away on her own. We look at their messy lives from the relative stability of Berlin. And after that fulcrum comes the Baku half, which is just as messy and involves a road trip during which Leyla and Jonoun fall thoroughly out of love, leaving Altay to fall for a golden boy who’s built a nest for himself in the regime’s comfortable closet. And then comes the jaded fairytale ending, which Grjasnowa gives away rather with her choice of quote for the second half. And the best thing is: she does it deliberately, I’m sure of it, her narrator being cynical for so many understandable reasons. Really, the only possible reaction on closing the book is a tired laugh, a Woody Allen kind of laugh at how crap the world is. Allen, incidentally, delivers the novel’s first prefacing quote.

There are a few leitmotifs here that don’t quite come to the fore – more birds, some folklore elements that might be more prominent in a different novel or if Grjasnowa’s characters didn’t wave them off with amused disinterest. I almost didn’t notice them on my first reading, so I do wonder if they’re even necessary or don’t just muddy the waters. The way I read Die juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe, though, is that Grjasnowa is writing against norms and classifications. Her characters are neither bad nor good, neither fish nor flesh, not passionate about much at all, and not really classifiable in society’s preferred terms when it comes to sexuality either (neither Berlin’s preferred terms nor Baku’s, incidentally – there’s an amusing scene when Farid berates Altay for being gay in a Western way, interested in art and film and culture, and shudders at the thought of a gay pride parade).

And it seems to me that Olga Grjasnowa is trying to achieve the same effect with her writing, rebelling against much-repeated creative writing programme wisdoms like “show, don’t tell”. And if you read it like that then it’s funny, despite the depressing subject matter. Like Woody Allen. I assume he, too, is in there to make us feel slightly uncomfortable about sexuality and the family. It works for me.

More Drinking... with Olga Grjasnowa

I went out drinking with fabulous German writer Olga Grjasnowa. It was good.

Olga Grjasnowa: Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt

And on the subject of literature with an agenda, here's some I very much enjoyed. Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt is a debut novel by Olga Grjasnowa, a young writer originally from Azerbaijan. Who is lovely, I've met her twice now. Her first-person narrator Maria (Mascha) Kogan is living in Frankfurt with her partner Elias, a photographer who injures his leg and ends up in hospital very early on. Maria is in her mid-twenties and also originally from Baku. She is studying to become an interpreter, a very ambitious student who speaks French, German, Russian, English and Arabic. We learn gradually that her parents are Russian Jews and that the family emigrated to Germany in 1996. Elias’s injury is complicated and his recovery is slow. In one impressive scene, Mascha spots an injured rabbit outside the hospital while Elias is being operated on. Not knowing any prayers, she decides to strike a bargain with God – he can have the rabbit but not Elias. She drops a heavy stone on the animal to smash its skull, a startling scene that characterises Mascha perfectly.

Elias survives and we see more of their relationship. The elephant in the room is Mascha’s trauma over her childhood in Baku. Elias feels hurt because she has never told him why the family left. She does manage to tell him a story – about a seven-year-old child whose father took her to her grandmother’s house. A young woman was shot, falling to the ground at the child’s feet and staining her shoes and her face with her blood. At this point the narrator breaks off and tells the story of the civil war in Azerbaijan, starting from 1987. Territorial dispute with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, demonstrations, pogroms, mass movement of minority Armenians and Azerbaijanis on either side of the border, an outpouring of nationalism, and on 13 January 1990 a pogrom in Baku itself, with members of the new National Front going from house to house and slaughtering Armenians. “My father tugged at my arm to make me hurry up. My grandmother’s house was only three streets away. By the time I got there my childhood was over.”

Russian tanks arrive, war breaks out in Nagorno-Karabakh, a million Azerbaijani refugees from there camping on the streets, gas, electricity and water shortages. The intelligentsia and the mafia leave and the Kogan family desperately seek a way out, remembering their Jewish identity. Some go to Israel and are fired on by Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. Mascha’s branch opts for Germany, which accepts Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union – even though her grandmother was in a concentration camp and “the ashes are still warm”. Settled outside of Frankfurt, her parents' life revolves around the synagogue, which has a sideline selling kosher wine, and the ex-pat community where Georgian wine is the tipple of choice. Mascha is the rebellious success story of the family. She soon realises that languages are the key to survival in Germany. Speaking good German gains her more respect and better treatment: “Applications were granted according to the thickness of our accents.” 

When Elias dies unexpectedly, Mascha blames herself for not waking up in time to save him. “The Talmud tells us to commemorate the dead. If I’d had it on hand I’d have thrown it in a furnace. But it was in some box or other with my videotape of Schindler’s List.” After an awful funeral, Mascha returns to their flat and withdraws into herself, imagining Elias is coming home at any moment. She somehow manages to take her finals and then sleeps her way into a job with a German foundation in Tel Aviv.

From here on the novel plays out in Israel. Here, the atmosphere is oppressive from the outset. Many Israelis are hostile to Mascha because she speaks Arabic but not Hebrew. The army security team at the airport shoots holes in her laptop, their suspicions alerted by the Arabic characters on the keyboard. Her job is hardly a challenge – translating the odd report on exchange programmes or women’s groups, activities referred to as “Arab-hugging”. She has some contact to her relatives here, Russians leading morose lives barricaded into illegal settlements because they had no idea of the politics when they first arrived. And she becomes sexually involved with a local brother and sister.

Although she had seen Israel as a way out, Mascha feels increasingly pressurised by her personal and political situation. As her mental state spirals downwards, the omnipresent weapons and uniforms remind her of the neighbours killed in Baku. In the end her concerned friends in Germany sign her up for the UN interpreting exam and she hands in her notice after a particularly degrading day at work. But before she leaves, her Israeli lover Tal asks her to accompany her and a group of activists to Ramallah as an interpreter.

In the final section, Mascha enters Palestine with the group but climbs out of a window and goes AWOL in the West Bank, where she meets a wedding photographer who turns out to be a former Hamas fighter. Here too, people are hostile to her: her dress is too short so she must be a whore, but if she wears something longer she’ll look like an Israeli settler and fears she’ll be attacked for that too. The soldiers are even younger than in Israel. The NGOs at every turn seem to her like a new form of colonisation. Appalled by the squalor, Mascha finally loses it at a wedding and wanders the streets again, reminded of her childhood. She thinks back to that traumatic day and we finally hear the whole story.

What’s exciting about the novel is that Olga Grjasnowa really captures a political and personal mood quite common among the younger generation. Mascha and her friends in Germany are close to what we might call post-identity politics. They are sick of being stereotyped as Turks, Arabs, Russians, Jews or even east Germans. They want to lead their own lives free from the expectations of their parents and society – in terms of sexuality and their working lives, where they choose to live, and so on. And yet Mascha ultimately can’t escape the trauma of her personal origins. As such, the book doesn’t offer any easy answers, just as it raises more questions than solutions on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Despite the deep sadness and hopelessness that pervade the novel, Grjasnowa has managed to infuse it with subtle and cynical humour. Even at moments of extreme stress, she has an eye for the bizarre – for instance a memorial for a Palestinian “martyr” decorated with a life-sized portrait of the deceased, pointing a machine gun at his own resting place. Or an overly correct German who treats Mascha as the personification of all things Jewish and defends Israel to the hilt, only to crop up in Jerusalem again as a rabid supporter of the Palestinians. Through a large cast of minor characters, Grjasnowa gives us a detailed portrayal of the young generation in Germany and Israel. The language is taut and at times poetic, using some great images. Grjasnowa picks up the motif of the murdered woman to bring us to a satisfactory end in the literary sense, if not the personal one for her character.

I was very affected by the novel. It left me feeling sad but very thoughtful, showed the issue of Israel and Palestine in an unusual light, and highlighted the little-known conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The childhood perspective in the Baku sections contrasts well with the clever, cynical adult narrator. Grjasnowa deliberately avoids many of the clichés that have become expected of “migrant writers” in Germany, such as the use of folkloric elements and loan translations and of course the serving up of simple stereotypes. As such, the novel makes for a more challenging read than many of her immediate contemporaries, putting into practice what a number of writers have been debating in recent years. This is an overtly political book that I hope causes a stir. And a little bird tells me it's going to be available in English at some point too.

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?

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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.

Books and Things I'm Looking Forward To

I'm back! And thinking about what excitement 2012 has to offer for German book lovers. Here are a few books and things I'm looking forward to in the coming months.

Benjamin Stein follows up The Canvas (coming out in English in September, trans. Brian Zumhagen) with Replay in January. Very different, very exciting, very well written. You may be surprised. That may be part of the point.

Then in February we get to read Olga Grjasnowa's debut novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt. Or rather, you do - I already have and was extremely impressed.

Next out is Franziska Gerstenberg's third book, Spiel mit ihr. I'm hoping to finally find a female literary fiction writer who dares to write about (good) sex. We shall see.

More in February, a rather busy month: my friend Oliver Bottini has a new crime novel out, Der kalte Traum, which he researched in Croatia.

Another friend shares that release date (perhaps some horoscope thing?): Tamara Bach's fan-blooming-tastic YA novel Was vom Sommer übrig ist. You will weep. I did. I believe there will also be a launch party, at which I will get drunk in public and stroke people's faces but hopefully not weep.

Followed the next day by Thomas von Steinaecker's new novel Das Jahr, in dem ich aufhörte mir Sorgen zu machen und anfing zu träumen. It sounds intriguing, playing with the present and the future and using more than the written word.

Along similar lines, perhaps, is Matthias Senkel's Frühe Vögel, dealing with aviation and storytelling and again using unusual media, funnily enough recommended by Thomas von Steinaecker. Out in March.

And then a wee birthday gift in April from Suhrkamp (you shouldn't have!): a new collection of short stories by Ralf Rothmann - Shakespeares Hühner.

I'm also looking forward to the Leipzig Book Fair and attendant prizes in March and the London Book Fair in April (another birthday gift - really you are spoiling me...) but sadly and contrary to stubborn rumours, I won't be going to the no doubt excellent Festival Neue Literatur in New York in February. I will have at least two translations of my own out at some point in the year though: Helene Hegemann's Axolotl Roadkill (fingers crossed for June...) and Sibylle Lewitscharoff's Apostoloff. Plus possibly the book I'm working on now, Inka Parei's precise, intelligent and haunting novel Was Dunkelheit war. "My" authors Inka Parei and Clemens Meyer will be out and about in the English-speaking world, in the USA, the UK and New Zealand, and if all goes well Helene Hegemann should be in the UK to launch our book too. Oh, and New Zealanders can look forward to all sorts of amazing German-lit related delights as quid pro quo for being the guest of honour at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair.

Ah, who could fail to blush with anticipation in the face of all these treats?