I have been busy, and away, and the away part was at the Leipzig Book Fair, where the big fiction prize of the spring went to Saša Stanišić for his second novel, Vor dem Fest. And everyone was very pleased because it's a wonderful book made up of what feels like hundreds of stories about a village in rural East Germany on the eve of the local festival. And now I've just this minute finished reading it and am still away with the fairies – who don't come into it, although there are ghosts and angels and eloquent ferrymen and characters dead and alive and real and invented.
What is it about? It's about the people who live in the village, and all of them are odd but then aren't we all, and they narrate the story in a strange fourth-person voice that opens the novel with a "We are sad" and closes it with a puzzling "we bid twelve". They don't all live in the village at the same time because some of them are from the past and some of them just live in the past, and some of them speak in rhymes and some of them would kill for a cigarette. Some of them are good with their hands and some of them have talents that don't come in very handy but count for something nonetheless.
You might be familiar with Stanišić's debut How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, which was a big hit for good reason and was also ultimately about telling stories and about place. One of the most impressive things he wrote between then and now was a piece published at Words Without Borders, "Three Myths of Immigrant Writing", in which he explores expectations of writers who originally come from other countries or languages to the ones they write in. He explodes the following three myths: Firstly, that there is such a thing as an "immigrant literature" as a homogenous category. Secondly, that writing by immigrants is necessarily about the immigrant experience, intercultural phenonema, etc. And thirdly, that exophonic writers enrich their chosen literary language in a way that "native speaker" writers do not. Please read the whole article because all of his points are valid and worth taking note of. As far as I'm aware, people are beginning to do so – I'm seeing university courses on things like "Turkish-German narratives" rather than "literature by foreigners" and fewer panels on which writers are required to dissect the influence of their ethnic background on the language of their writing. Or maybe I've stopped paying attention.
Bizarrely, the arrival of these ideas in the mainstream was confirmed for me by the reaction to a recent article by Maxim Biller, himself born outside of Germany. Being thoroughly fed up of (male) writers slagging off other writers and telling them how to do a better job by writing more like they do themselves, I didn't actually read the article, but I understand the gist of it was that it was cowardly or sycophantic or in some way incorrect for an immigrant writer to write about a village in rural East Germany. Anyway, everyone else (including the Leipzig judges) leapt to Stanišić's defence and said hey, anyone can write about anything they bloody well like, mate, as long as it's good. And the judges at least seem to have taken care not to say that Stanišić enriches the German language with his adorable little outsider's linguistic quirks, bla bla bla. I haven't read any reviews though, so maybe lazy critics are still saying that but never mind. The point seems to have hit home to some extent. And I don't think he got the award for that reason either, but simply because Vor dem Fest is an excellent book.
I don't really want to tell you much more about the book because in a way I'd like to keep it to myself for a little while, all private inside me. But I will, because I think as many people should read it as possible. There's a village called Fürstenfelde, which is based on a number of villages with similar names where the writer spent some time researching the novel. It has a lake but the ferryman has died, and it has a village museum with an archivist who likes to watch Buffy, and a church with a born-again vicar and a new bell ringer. It has a bakery but no pub any more, so the men meet up to drink in a lock-up garage where they wash their own glasses. A lot of the people who live there are old and a few of them are young but they may not be staying. And Stanišić tells us what happens in the 24 hours or so prior to the village festival. He uses incidents from the present day but also intersplices individual characters' memories, historical documents of dubious provenance and local myths. Along the way all the elements get swirled around and tangled up.
I've seen Stanišić read from the novel a couple of times, and he always enchants his audience with the spiralling stories and their quiet humour. On one occasion before publication, the crowd laughed too much and he commented to his editor that he'd have to take that bit out. Now, Vor dem Fest is odd in the kind of way that is still making me smile as I write this, but friendly to all its characters. At the same time, that smile is a melancholy one because the village is probably going to die out. The book is also spattered with sentences that shine like aphorisms but may also be ironic: "For the strong, every place is home" – "Those who don't venture beyond reality will never conquer the truth" – "The GDR won't die while the last GDR hairdryer is still drying hair". Like in his debut, Stanišić plays around a little with kitsch but is never mean about it. I'm so glad he wrote this book.
Showing posts with label sasa stanisic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sasa stanisic. Show all posts
Monday, 17 March 2014
Thursday, 6 February 2014
Leipzig Book Fair Prize Nominees
Today they announced the fifteen nominated titles for the three categories in the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair, Germany's big springtime literary award.
Non-fiction ranges from pop theory to an analysis of changing fashions to a biography of Max Weber. Translations come from Norwegian, American English, Japanese, French and Romanian, and here are the fiction nominations:
Fabian Hirschmann: Am Ende schmeißen wir mit Gold
A debut novel that's being compared to Wolfgang Herrndorf's Tschick and Thomas Klupp's Paradiso, possibly because it's about a young man from a comfortable background going on a road trip, it would appear. I'd say it's closer to Klupp, but only because I hate the protagonist already, from the short sample I've read. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
Per Leo: Flut und Boden
The embarrassing pun in the title gives it away – a grandson named Per is fascinated by the story behind his Nazi grandfather and his Goethe-obsessed great-uncle, who grew up in a villa on the River Weser. It might be interesting, or it might be another personal reckoning with Germany's dark twentieth century history. Of course, it might also be both.
Martin Mosebach: Das Blutbuchenfest
Conservative Germany's favourite old man contrasts a garden party with the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia. I suspect there will be lots of deplorable wealthy people doing debauched things, while the Bosnian cleaning lady looks on in horror and enjoys the simple pleasures in life. Certainly, she gets innocently naked on page 10. But people do so love his style.
Katja Petrowskaya: Vielleicht Esther
I shall be reading this one, most definitely. Petrowskaya won the Bachmann Prize last year with an extract from the manuscript, and it was good, solid, touching writing. Rights have already sold to fourteen countries and everyone's talking about it. Her family history (Jewish, Ukraine) in short chapters or stories, with the first-person narrator reflecting on whether it's OK to write about them and whether the stories are true, as far as I recall. I think it might win.
Saša Stanišić: Vor dem Fest
Another personal must. I've heard the author read from the manuscript twice now and enjoyed it enormously. As did the Döblin Prize judges, who gave him the bi-annual award for unpublished manuscripts. Stories, myths, characters from a Brandenburg village, swooping between the centuries – with a quiet humour that Stanišić worked hard to get pitch-perfect.
The winners will be announced at the book fair in Leipzig on 13 March.
Non-fiction ranges from pop theory to an analysis of changing fashions to a biography of Max Weber. Translations come from Norwegian, American English, Japanese, French and Romanian, and here are the fiction nominations:
Fabian Hirschmann: Am Ende schmeißen wir mit Gold
A debut novel that's being compared to Wolfgang Herrndorf's Tschick and Thomas Klupp's Paradiso, possibly because it's about a young man from a comfortable background going on a road trip, it would appear. I'd say it's closer to Klupp, but only because I hate the protagonist already, from the short sample I've read. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
Per Leo: Flut und Boden
The embarrassing pun in the title gives it away – a grandson named Per is fascinated by the story behind his Nazi grandfather and his Goethe-obsessed great-uncle, who grew up in a villa on the River Weser. It might be interesting, or it might be another personal reckoning with Germany's dark twentieth century history. Of course, it might also be both.
Martin Mosebach: Das Blutbuchenfest
Conservative Germany's favourite old man contrasts a garden party with the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia. I suspect there will be lots of deplorable wealthy people doing debauched things, while the Bosnian cleaning lady looks on in horror and enjoys the simple pleasures in life. Certainly, she gets innocently naked on page 10. But people do so love his style.
Katja Petrowskaya: Vielleicht Esther
I shall be reading this one, most definitely. Petrowskaya won the Bachmann Prize last year with an extract from the manuscript, and it was good, solid, touching writing. Rights have already sold to fourteen countries and everyone's talking about it. Her family history (Jewish, Ukraine) in short chapters or stories, with the first-person narrator reflecting on whether it's OK to write about them and whether the stories are true, as far as I recall. I think it might win.
Saša Stanišić: Vor dem Fest
Another personal must. I've heard the author read from the manuscript twice now and enjoyed it enormously. As did the Döblin Prize judges, who gave him the bi-annual award for unpublished manuscripts. Stories, myths, characters from a Brandenburg village, swooping between the centuries – with a quiet humour that Stanišić worked hard to get pitch-perfect.
The winners will be announced at the book fair in Leipzig on 13 March.
Sunday, 5 May 2013
Alfred Döblin Prize to Sasa Stanisic
The Alfred Döblin Prize was founded by Günter Grass after he came into a lot of money. It's awarded every two years for an as yet unpublished manuscript by a previously published writer. A jury makes a selection of six nominees (this year from over 400 submissions) and they're invited to a day-long workshop-like reading at the Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin. The audience, who are encouraged to participate in the discussion, is made up of critics, editors, publishers, agents, and a small number of translators. That means the discussion takes place on a very high level, but at the same time is very supportive. Let me say at this point that I was once again very grateful to the LCB for the invitation. There are times when I get a little jaded, when I've been reading and listening to writing that just tires me out and makes me feel cynical. Yesterday's event very effectively cured me of that feeling, by presenting simply excellent German writing.
Each nominee read for about twenty minutes, followed by twenty minutes' discussion. You can tell by the headline who won, but I do want to tell you a little about the other texts because all of them were impressive in their own way.
Nora Bossong read from a novel in progress with the working title of Nino war hier - dealing in part with Italy's 1920s communist leader Antonio Gramsci. I was very taken by the piece, which mixed realism with fantastic elements and used some quite elaborate language. There were some in the audience who found it too elaborate, but I found if you're going to have ghosts of obscure communists wandering graveyards and insane, impoverished Italian landladies, you can afford to put a little more colour into the writing itself too. I look forward to the finished product.
Heinz Helle read from a post-apocalyptic manuscript called, I believe, Brixen. It came as a shock after Bossong's text but it would have done under any circumstances. In a good way. His language pared back to the bones, Helle described a group of young men roaming the land after something - a fire? - had wiped most people out. Brutal stuff, brutally done, with flashbacks intimating what had happened. My question, which others in the audience voiced, was what propelled the story. There was a suggestion that it might evolve into an And Then There Were None-type serial bumping-off scenario. Excellent but no doubt harrowing reading.
Svenja Leiber's working title is Porträt mit Knochenarm. This seemed to be one of the most developed manuscripts, as Leiber had quite set ideas about the novel's scope. To wit, it's a novel about music with a protagonist who becomes a violinist. She read from the beginning, set in a north German village in 1911. Again, the language was thrilling. My issue with it, however, was something Leiber touched on herself – the risk that it might become too bucolic. Interestingly, I think many of us now view German rural life at that time through a White Ribbon lens, and were expecting brutality. It was there, but then so was humour and affection. Although the author said the text's musicality decreases throughout the novel (which sounds like a shame), its subject matter – 20th-C German history channelled through a single family – is something that could make it a major success, if cleverly marketed. I know many British readers would be very into the idea.
Winner Sasa Stanisic presented an extract from a book called Anna, probably. English-speaking readers may be familiar with his novel How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, trans. Anthea Bell. Or you should be, at least. Again, Stanisic has put together stories upon stories, this time based around a village in the Uckermark in the former East Germany. There are local myths, fictionalised historical anecdotes, modern-day miniatures, all melding into one another. And humour, verging on silliness but sometimes drifting into scary. As I listened, the playful language made me translate it in my head, and I envied Anthea Bell the joy of one day putting it into English. This is going to be a very good book indeed.
Thomas von Steinaecker read from another post-apocalypse scenario, entitled 2045, this time more complex. It's planned in the form of four exercise books written by a young narrator who can't remember what the world was like before the disaster - although not actually separated into four short physical books in a slipcase, which I personally think would be a fun thing to do. And as he starts to understand the world better, his style apparently changes from the hard-going mix of faux-high register and deliberately disturbing anglicisms we heard yesterday. I think perhaps it was this style that raised a few hackles in the audience, and also perhaps the fact that post-apocalyptic writing isn't as established in German literature as it is elsewhere. Certainly, Steinaecker touched on some fascinating ideas and psychologies here, using his blank-canvas setting to explore human nature. An ambitious project, which I look forward to reading more of.
After hours of texts, Gabriele Weingartner had a harder time with her apparently autobiographical manuscript, Einübung in Ironie. It was a story of a woman looking back on her marriage, a relationship with her significantly older literature professor that seemed rather out of time for the heady late-60s West Berlin setting, no doubt a deliberate contrast. The jury vehemently defended the conventional style as perfectly suited to the material, and praised the wealth of literary references. Perhaps the irony was lost on the audience out of sheer exhaustion.
Sadly, the prize's founder and funder Grass was unwell and couldn't attend. He missed an inspiring day by the lake, and excellent soup. Stanisic gets €10,000 and the honour of being added to an impressive roll call of previous winners. Not that he'd ever use such a hackneyed phrase. He seemed very happy.
Each nominee read for about twenty minutes, followed by twenty minutes' discussion. You can tell by the headline who won, but I do want to tell you a little about the other texts because all of them were impressive in their own way.
Nora Bossong read from a novel in progress with the working title of Nino war hier - dealing in part with Italy's 1920s communist leader Antonio Gramsci. I was very taken by the piece, which mixed realism with fantastic elements and used some quite elaborate language. There were some in the audience who found it too elaborate, but I found if you're going to have ghosts of obscure communists wandering graveyards and insane, impoverished Italian landladies, you can afford to put a little more colour into the writing itself too. I look forward to the finished product.
Heinz Helle read from a post-apocalyptic manuscript called, I believe, Brixen. It came as a shock after Bossong's text but it would have done under any circumstances. In a good way. His language pared back to the bones, Helle described a group of young men roaming the land after something - a fire? - had wiped most people out. Brutal stuff, brutally done, with flashbacks intimating what had happened. My question, which others in the audience voiced, was what propelled the story. There was a suggestion that it might evolve into an And Then There Were None-type serial bumping-off scenario. Excellent but no doubt harrowing reading.
Svenja Leiber's working title is Porträt mit Knochenarm. This seemed to be one of the most developed manuscripts, as Leiber had quite set ideas about the novel's scope. To wit, it's a novel about music with a protagonist who becomes a violinist. She read from the beginning, set in a north German village in 1911. Again, the language was thrilling. My issue with it, however, was something Leiber touched on herself – the risk that it might become too bucolic. Interestingly, I think many of us now view German rural life at that time through a White Ribbon lens, and were expecting brutality. It was there, but then so was humour and affection. Although the author said the text's musicality decreases throughout the novel (which sounds like a shame), its subject matter – 20th-C German history channelled through a single family – is something that could make it a major success, if cleverly marketed. I know many British readers would be very into the idea.
Winner Sasa Stanisic presented an extract from a book called Anna, probably. English-speaking readers may be familiar with his novel How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, trans. Anthea Bell. Or you should be, at least. Again, Stanisic has put together stories upon stories, this time based around a village in the Uckermark in the former East Germany. There are local myths, fictionalised historical anecdotes, modern-day miniatures, all melding into one another. And humour, verging on silliness but sometimes drifting into scary. As I listened, the playful language made me translate it in my head, and I envied Anthea Bell the joy of one day putting it into English. This is going to be a very good book indeed.
Thomas von Steinaecker read from another post-apocalypse scenario, entitled 2045, this time more complex. It's planned in the form of four exercise books written by a young narrator who can't remember what the world was like before the disaster - although not actually separated into four short physical books in a slipcase, which I personally think would be a fun thing to do. And as he starts to understand the world better, his style apparently changes from the hard-going mix of faux-high register and deliberately disturbing anglicisms we heard yesterday. I think perhaps it was this style that raised a few hackles in the audience, and also perhaps the fact that post-apocalyptic writing isn't as established in German literature as it is elsewhere. Certainly, Steinaecker touched on some fascinating ideas and psychologies here, using his blank-canvas setting to explore human nature. An ambitious project, which I look forward to reading more of.
After hours of texts, Gabriele Weingartner had a harder time with her apparently autobiographical manuscript, Einübung in Ironie. It was a story of a woman looking back on her marriage, a relationship with her significantly older literature professor that seemed rather out of time for the heady late-60s West Berlin setting, no doubt a deliberate contrast. The jury vehemently defended the conventional style as perfectly suited to the material, and praised the wealth of literary references. Perhaps the irony was lost on the audience out of sheer exhaustion.
Sadly, the prize's founder and funder Grass was unwell and couldn't attend. He missed an inspiring day by the lake, and excellent soup. Stanisic gets €10,000 and the honour of being added to an impressive roll call of previous winners. Not that he'd ever use such a hackneyed phrase. He seemed very happy.
Monday, 2 November 2009
Four German Titles on Incredibly Long Impac Longlist
They've announced the 156-strong longlist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Titles are nominated by participating libraries, which I think is a fantastic idea. And there are four German books in the running for the €100,000 prize - which would be split 75:25 between the author and their translator, should a translated title win.
The books are:
Christoph Hein, Settlement, tr. Philip Boehm
Ingo Schulze, New Lives, tr. John E Woods
Sasa Stanisic, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, tr. Anthea Bell
Ilija Trojanov, The Collector of Worlds, tr. William Hobson
You can see which libraries participated and which books they nominated, and a brief look shows something interesting. This time around, the libraries in Germany almost all picked at least one German book, while the Austrian and Swiss libraries were completely unpatriotic. Of the thirteen nominations from England, one is a translated title. Irish libraries suggest two translations, Scottish none (although there were only two libraries participating). South African zero. USA four of around seventy suggestions. Australia none, New Zealand one. Barbados & Jamaica none, Canada one. (And sorry to have overlooked, like, half the English-speaking countries on the list. It's because I don't get out enough.)
In most cases, translated books were nominated solely by libraries in their countries of origin (which explains the lack of Austrian and Swiss titles on the list). But at least this is a good way to get greater attention for those books in the English-speaking world, however much it smacks of Eurovisionism. The actual judging is more traditional, so that also gives less popular titles a fair shot at the prize.
The books are:
Christoph Hein, Settlement, tr. Philip Boehm
Ingo Schulze, New Lives, tr. John E Woods
Sasa Stanisic, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, tr. Anthea Bell
Ilija Trojanov, The Collector of Worlds, tr. William Hobson
You can see which libraries participated and which books they nominated, and a brief look shows something interesting. This time around, the libraries in Germany almost all picked at least one German book, while the Austrian and Swiss libraries were completely unpatriotic. Of the thirteen nominations from England, one is a translated title. Irish libraries suggest two translations, Scottish none (although there were only two libraries participating). South African zero. USA four of around seventy suggestions. Australia none, New Zealand one. Barbados & Jamaica none, Canada one. (And sorry to have overlooked, like, half the English-speaking countries on the list. It's because I don't get out enough.)
In most cases, translated books were nominated solely by libraries in their countries of origin (which explains the lack of Austrian and Swiss titles on the list). But at least this is a good way to get greater attention for those books in the English-speaking world, however much it smacks of Eurovisionism. The actual judging is more traditional, so that also gives less popular titles a fair shot at the prize.
Sunday, 14 June 2009
Bell Wins Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize
After a good half-hour of searching, I can finally reveal that this year's Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize was awarded to Anthea Bell for her rendering of Sasa Stanisic's How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. I don't know the translation but I'm sure the book itself deserves all the honours it can get - and its language in the German presents plenty of exciting challenges for a translator.
Guest judge Hermione Lee said, "The translation feels free-flowing, natural and colloquial, and never flags in energy and vigour."
Congratulations!
Guest judge Hermione Lee said, "The translation feels free-flowing, natural and colloquial, and never flags in energy and vigour."
Congratulations!
Tuesday, 14 April 2009
Anthology Anthology (I)
I’ve mentioned the really rather good Das Magazin here before. It’s generally very active in promoting writers and literature, and this month the literary editor, Wiebke Poromba, has a wee rant. It’s not against a particularly difficult target though – she complains that young German-language writers don’t have much to say for themselves. Schluss mit dem ganzen Larifari, she proclaims – perhaps deliberately (mis-)quoting Berlin’s hot pop sensation, Peter Fox – enough of the folderol! All these clean-cut young men going straight from school to writing careers, so polite and sober and unexcited. Her two examples are Daniel Kehlmann and Benjamin Lebert, who she says were pressed into literary contracts at such an impressionable age that they didn’t have time to experience life proper before they started churning out novels. Her suggestion is vodka rations for young writers – and reading more women.
Aside from the cliché-ridden argumentation, I only agree with Poromba to a certain extent. I’ve just finished a mammoth young-writer-athon and I found plenty to get me excited, although there were also authors I too found rather soporific. In our recent interview, Claudius Nießen mentioned the anthology Turboprop – Beste Stories, which he edited along with Christoph Graeber last year. And this year I brought another anthology back with me from Leipzig, Zeit der Witze – Texte junger Autoren. And because they both feature young(ish) German-language writers, it made sense to me to review them together.
Starting with what I find the better of the two, just to rob you of any sense of tension, Turboprop. It’s a collection of stories by the editors’ favourite guests from the reading series of the same name.
And it kicks in with a piece by one of my favourites, Clemens Meyer. Never one to shy away from “real life” issues, Meyer has turned to prostitution. This is a slightly rambling monologue by a not-quite-so-young prostitute about her punters, how she got into it, and her secret dreams. I learnt a lot, so it may well be meticulously researched. I think he’s written better – but you can’t accuse him of wanting to please any mothers-in-law with this story. And the next piece too stands out a mile – Anke Stelling, a youngish woman writing about Claudia, who has two young kids with Heiner the rebel, thought she was doing everything differently – and hates her life. With an ironically distanced narrator who tells us, “Oh, you know what, just to make it simpler, I’LL be Claudia.” And gives us the classic line: “Heiner wanted to be cheated on, there was no other explanation for his absences, so Claudia went to bed with the midwife.” I think I may have shouted for joy when I read that.
Then we get Tobias Hülswitt regaling tales of drug-taking in the Middle East, which I did find slightly yawnsome but which you can hardly claim is clean-cut. Annette Mingels has a solid relationship story, followed by an absolutely awesome piece by Guy Helminger mingling friendship, dream and gritty realism. Paul Brodowsky I personally find slightly difficult, and here he experiments to the point of becoming just plain uninteresting, with little to say but unusual ways of putting it.
Selim Özdogan, another of my personal faves, has contributed what he does very well – a short short story about friends, which captures the essence of being a young man (poor things) with his characteristic melancholy. Philip Meinhold does the same, also very well, against a backdrop that seems suspiciously like 90s Friedrichshain. In between them, Jochen Schmidt, a consummate comedian, made me laugh with a childhood story I think I’ve heard him read live, which had us rolling in the aisles. And Sasa Stanisic closes the anthology with a false-bottomed box of a political story, as reflective as his novel How the Solider Repairs the Gramophone but firmly set in Germany. Excellent stuff.
Zeit der Witze is a little more patchy, I have to admit. Book-ended by two big names – Uwe Tellkamp and Clemens Meyer – are sixteen young authors, mainly from the Leipzig creative writing programme. And I’d have to say that some of them confirm Poromba’s prejudices against young writers’ “gepflegte Langeweile” – cultivated boredom. But some of them are surprisingly good – or at least surprising.
One of the exiting things about creative writing programmes, I guess, is that students have a sounding board for experiments. A few of the short stories in this compilation read rather like attempts to try something new at all cost, playing with perspectives, narratives and characters. In a sense, it’s worth having the book on the shelf in the same way as buying art by young talents may mean you later own something by a recognised genius. Or it may not.
I enjoyed Johanna Hemkentokrax’s confusing tale of suburban antifascism, Christopher Kloeble’s extreme slow-motion twenty seconds of mathematics, Sebastian Brock’s thoroughly dislikeable hero, Katharina Schwanbeck’s painful coming-of-age story, and Marie T. Martin’s dystopian vision.
Tellingly though, what stood out for me in Zeit der Witze was the slightly more established authors. Clemens Meyer, again with a prostitute’s monologue, adds the grit that the others do rather lack. Uwe Tellkamp adds wry humour and experience with an account of his first book and how it came about. And Finn-Ole Heinrich adds searing honesty, with a narrator explaining his guilt at no longer fancying his girlfriend after an emergency amputation, in a very strong story that rightly gives the book its title.
Read one after the other like this, Turboprop clearly trumps Zeit der Witze. But it’s an unfair competition, with experienced authors pitted up against newcomers. Given a few years, I suspect some of the younger writers just coming out of creative writing programmes will be producing outstanding work – provided they do manage to gather the odd experience or two outside of academia. For those in Berlin, you can catch a couple of representatives of the Leipzig programme at the Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus on 24 April.
Aside from the cliché-ridden argumentation, I only agree with Poromba to a certain extent. I’ve just finished a mammoth young-writer-athon and I found plenty to get me excited, although there were also authors I too found rather soporific. In our recent interview, Claudius Nießen mentioned the anthology Turboprop – Beste Stories, which he edited along with Christoph Graeber last year. And this year I brought another anthology back with me from Leipzig, Zeit der Witze – Texte junger Autoren. And because they both feature young(ish) German-language writers, it made sense to me to review them together.
Starting with what I find the better of the two, just to rob you of any sense of tension, Turboprop. It’s a collection of stories by the editors’ favourite guests from the reading series of the same name.
And it kicks in with a piece by one of my favourites, Clemens Meyer. Never one to shy away from “real life” issues, Meyer has turned to prostitution. This is a slightly rambling monologue by a not-quite-so-young prostitute about her punters, how she got into it, and her secret dreams. I learnt a lot, so it may well be meticulously researched. I think he’s written better – but you can’t accuse him of wanting to please any mothers-in-law with this story. And the next piece too stands out a mile – Anke Stelling, a youngish woman writing about Claudia, who has two young kids with Heiner the rebel, thought she was doing everything differently – and hates her life. With an ironically distanced narrator who tells us, “Oh, you know what, just to make it simpler, I’LL be Claudia.” And gives us the classic line: “Heiner wanted to be cheated on, there was no other explanation for his absences, so Claudia went to bed with the midwife.” I think I may have shouted for joy when I read that.
Then we get Tobias Hülswitt regaling tales of drug-taking in the Middle East, which I did find slightly yawnsome but which you can hardly claim is clean-cut. Annette Mingels has a solid relationship story, followed by an absolutely awesome piece by Guy Helminger mingling friendship, dream and gritty realism. Paul Brodowsky I personally find slightly difficult, and here he experiments to the point of becoming just plain uninteresting, with little to say but unusual ways of putting it.
Selim Özdogan, another of my personal faves, has contributed what he does very well – a short short story about friends, which captures the essence of being a young man (poor things) with his characteristic melancholy. Philip Meinhold does the same, also very well, against a backdrop that seems suspiciously like 90s Friedrichshain. In between them, Jochen Schmidt, a consummate comedian, made me laugh with a childhood story I think I’ve heard him read live, which had us rolling in the aisles. And Sasa Stanisic closes the anthology with a false-bottomed box of a political story, as reflective as his novel How the Solider Repairs the Gramophone but firmly set in Germany. Excellent stuff.
Zeit der Witze is a little more patchy, I have to admit. Book-ended by two big names – Uwe Tellkamp and Clemens Meyer – are sixteen young authors, mainly from the Leipzig creative writing programme. And I’d have to say that some of them confirm Poromba’s prejudices against young writers’ “gepflegte Langeweile” – cultivated boredom. But some of them are surprisingly good – or at least surprising.
One of the exiting things about creative writing programmes, I guess, is that students have a sounding board for experiments. A few of the short stories in this compilation read rather like attempts to try something new at all cost, playing with perspectives, narratives and characters. In a sense, it’s worth having the book on the shelf in the same way as buying art by young talents may mean you later own something by a recognised genius. Or it may not.
I enjoyed Johanna Hemkentokrax’s confusing tale of suburban antifascism, Christopher Kloeble’s extreme slow-motion twenty seconds of mathematics, Sebastian Brock’s thoroughly dislikeable hero, Katharina Schwanbeck’s painful coming-of-age story, and Marie T. Martin’s dystopian vision.
Tellingly though, what stood out for me in Zeit der Witze was the slightly more established authors. Clemens Meyer, again with a prostitute’s monologue, adds the grit that the others do rather lack. Uwe Tellkamp adds wry humour and experience with an account of his first book and how it came about. And Finn-Ole Heinrich adds searing honesty, with a narrator explaining his guilt at no longer fancying his girlfriend after an emergency amputation, in a very strong story that rightly gives the book its title.
Read one after the other like this, Turboprop clearly trumps Zeit der Witze. But it’s an unfair competition, with experienced authors pitted up against newcomers. Given a few years, I suspect some of the younger writers just coming out of creative writing programmes will be producing outstanding work – provided they do manage to gather the odd experience or two outside of academia. For those in Berlin, you can catch a couple of representatives of the Leipzig programme at the Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus on 24 April.
Wednesday, 5 November 2008
Stanisic* - Wise Beyond his Publications
This month's Words Without Borders features a magnificent piece from Sasa Stanisic on myths of immigrant writing. Not unlike myself in my less erudite rant on the Chamisso Prize recently (which Stanisic received last time around), he criticises the expectation that writers from elsewhere should enrich their adopted language, more so than native-language authors. He also rails against the myths that there is a category by the name of "immigrant writing" at all, and that immigrant literature deals (or should deal) solely with the migrant experience.
Great reading matter, nicely packaged, and - in an ironic twist - rather well translated from the German by the author himself. I do find it slightly amusing, though, that an author who has written one (excellent) book can be so worldly-wise. But I suppose I haven't written any books at all and I still spout my opinions here on a near-daily basis. Still, it's a great feeling when you realise you're not the only person to hold a certain view.
If we must have a word for one category of "immigrant writing" at least, why not post-migrant literature? I'm rather inspired by the upcoming Dogland festival at and around Berlin's Ballhaus Naunynstraße, which features post-migrant theatre and the latest developments in dance, film, music and literature - including a new play by the ubiquitous Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel on sans-papiers. I know, I was trying not to mention him, but it's hard sometimes. Or an "evening of scenic songs" directed by Neco Celik (the very interesting interview behind this link goes some way to explaining what post-migrant might be in the German context). I can't spot any actual literature in the strictest sense on the programme as yet, but I live in hope.
*I do apologise for the lack of accents, etc. throughout this piece. It's been a long day, so you'll have to imagine them all for yourselves.
Great reading matter, nicely packaged, and - in an ironic twist - rather well translated from the German by the author himself. I do find it slightly amusing, though, that an author who has written one (excellent) book can be so worldly-wise. But I suppose I haven't written any books at all and I still spout my opinions here on a near-daily basis. Still, it's a great feeling when you realise you're not the only person to hold a certain view.
If we must have a word for one category of "immigrant writing" at least, why not post-migrant literature? I'm rather inspired by the upcoming Dogland festival at and around Berlin's Ballhaus Naunynstraße, which features post-migrant theatre and the latest developments in dance, film, music and literature - including a new play by the ubiquitous Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel on sans-papiers. I know, I was trying not to mention him, but it's hard sometimes. Or an "evening of scenic songs" directed by Neco Celik (the very interesting interview behind this link goes some way to explaining what post-migrant might be in the German context). I can't spot any actual literature in the strictest sense on the programme as yet, but I live in hope.
*I do apologise for the lack of accents, etc. throughout this piece. It's been a long day, so you'll have to imagine them all for yourselves.
Monday, 4 August 2008
Back Again
I'm back after two weeks of fun in the sun. I left my thinking cap firmly at my desk and didn't read a single German book. But even my secret vice, that most magnificent bastion of housewifely brain-fodder that is the Sainsbury's Magazine, didn't let me forget about German-language literature. For tucked in among Jamie Oliver's Take on Tapas, Mind and Body Secrets from Olympic Athletes and Sarah's Top Tips for Tomatoes was this little gem of an unexpected review:
Best Beach Reads. Lie back and relax - we've found thrillers, mysteries, family sagas and feel-good fiction that will keep you enthralled throughout those lazy days of summer...
An imaginative boy's life changes when war comes to town in the wonderful debut How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, §12.99) by Bosnian-born Sasa Stanisic (translated by Anthea Bell). First he and the other town children are herded into a cellar; then his parents whisk him away in the middle of the night.
Wahey! This is the future of fiction in translation! Reviewed in supermarket magazines! With the translator named! Deemed perfect summer reading rather than difficult and intellectual! Read by housewives in between a session of Olympic sit-ups and preparing Rick Stein's meze-style menu! Just think, folks, in ten years' time this will be normal - the lollipop lady will dip into Elfriede Jelinek's latest eBook whenever there's a lull in traffic, the man down the greengrocer's will discuss Faustian motifs with you while you squeeze his peaches, and Katie Price will have a PhD in comparative literature by then too. Or maybe twenty years, tops.
Best Beach Reads. Lie back and relax - we've found thrillers, mysteries, family sagas and feel-good fiction that will keep you enthralled throughout those lazy days of summer...
An imaginative boy's life changes when war comes to town in the wonderful debut How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, §12.99) by Bosnian-born Sasa Stanisic (translated by Anthea Bell). First he and the other town children are herded into a cellar; then his parents whisk him away in the middle of the night.
Wahey! This is the future of fiction in translation! Reviewed in supermarket magazines! With the translator named! Deemed perfect summer reading rather than difficult and intellectual! Read by housewives in between a session of Olympic sit-ups and preparing Rick Stein's meze-style menu! Just think, folks, in ten years' time this will be normal - the lollipop lady will dip into Elfriede Jelinek's latest eBook whenever there's a lull in traffic, the man down the greengrocer's will discuss Faustian motifs with you while you squeeze his peaches, and Katie Price will have a PhD in comparative literature by then too. Or maybe twenty years, tops.
Wednesday, 9 July 2008
They Seem to Like It, Saša
That impish* writer Saša Stanišić has posted a long list of glowing reviews of How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone on his website. Things like "brilliantly cockeyed prose," "rich with experience and imagination," "an astonishing accomplishment." Most of them are from the USA, with one each from Canada and the UK (from the Guardian), although that may be because they were collected by his US publisher, Grove Atlantic. Or because Stanišić went on a brief tour of the States in June and has yet to hit Britain - he'll be in Edinburgh on the 9th of August though.
None of the review extracts mention the novel's translator, Anthea Bell, although many of them refer to Stanišić's use of language. The Guardian review does at least credit Bell prominently, unlike the publisher's website. The translator Ross Benjamin also comments briefly on the quality of Bell's work in his Bookforum review. I'm far too lazy to look up all the other reviews in full, so I'll just assume that Bell's name doesn't feature in them - which would be standard practice in reviewing translated fiction, with notable exceptions.
I find this rather worrying. Anthea Bell is the closest the UK has to a "well-known translator" - she even has her own Wikipedia entry, for goodness sake. Yet hardly anybody seems to find it worth mentioning that such a venerated person has worked on the book; almost an honour in itself if you ask me.
A couple of years ago, a group of British translators took it upon themselves to gently remind newspaper reviewers that books don't get put into English automatically - there is a person involved and their work is an artistic process. That did produce results of a kind, with most of the UK papers now at least crediting the translator in the review heading. During the campaign itself, they also managed to rustle up the odd sentence about the quality of the translation, although that would seem to be slipping again.
Perhaps reviewers don't feel qualified to judge the quality of translations, especially as few of them will be able to compare with the original, or indeed have the time to do so. American PEN has a very useful guide tucked away on its website that should offer some support in that case. If only reviewers would read it. And if only more publishers would make things that little bit easier for them by providing the information they need.
*I think "impish" is the perfect word to describe Saša Stanišić. In person, he sometimes exudes a real sense of boyish glee that makes you think he'd never experienced anything negative in his whole life. In fact I thought it was my own description, but then I noticed it in the Los Angeles Times review. So I assume Donna Seaman has also seen him close up...
None of the review extracts mention the novel's translator, Anthea Bell, although many of them refer to Stanišić's use of language. The Guardian review does at least credit Bell prominently, unlike the publisher's website. The translator Ross Benjamin also comments briefly on the quality of Bell's work in his Bookforum review. I'm far too lazy to look up all the other reviews in full, so I'll just assume that Bell's name doesn't feature in them - which would be standard practice in reviewing translated fiction, with notable exceptions.
I find this rather worrying. Anthea Bell is the closest the UK has to a "well-known translator" - she even has her own Wikipedia entry, for goodness sake. Yet hardly anybody seems to find it worth mentioning that such a venerated person has worked on the book; almost an honour in itself if you ask me.
A couple of years ago, a group of British translators took it upon themselves to gently remind newspaper reviewers that books don't get put into English automatically - there is a person involved and their work is an artistic process. That did produce results of a kind, with most of the UK papers now at least crediting the translator in the review heading. During the campaign itself, they also managed to rustle up the odd sentence about the quality of the translation, although that would seem to be slipping again.
Perhaps reviewers don't feel qualified to judge the quality of translations, especially as few of them will be able to compare with the original, or indeed have the time to do so. American PEN has a very useful guide tucked away on its website that should offer some support in that case. If only reviewers would read it. And if only more publishers would make things that little bit easier for them by providing the information they need.
*I think "impish" is the perfect word to describe Saša Stanišić. In person, he sometimes exudes a real sense of boyish glee that makes you think he'd never experienced anything negative in his whole life. In fact I thought it was my own description, but then I noticed it in the Los Angeles Times review. So I assume Donna Seaman has also seen him close up...
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone
I just noticed Anthea Bell's translation of Saša Stanišic's Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert is due out any day now. Stewart at the World Literature Forum doesn't like it, but acknowledges it "seems tipped to be this year's translation success." So I thought I'd add a little more to what I bravely wrote in response.
First off, although I have friends and acquaintances from various former Yugoslavian states, my entire "knowledge" of the culture is based on Cliff Richard's Summer Holiday and Kurt Held's book Die Rote Zora. Incidentally, this is an absolute classic German children's book, written by a disillusioned Communist in Swiss exile and published under a pseudonym in 1941. It seems to have been published in English back in 1967 under the title The Outsiders of Uskoken Castle, translated by Lynn Aubrey. Time for a rediscovery, I feel, especially after the gorgeous film recently made of it. Bloomsbury, could Zora be the new Harry Potter?
But back to the soldier and the gramophone. Now I haven't read the translation, obviously, but I thoroughly enjoyed the original. I even enjoyed the meandering titles that got Stewart's goat - and which Ross Benjamin describes in Bookforum as "playfully mimic(ing) Cervantes and Grimmelshausen by providing brief, tantalizingly eccentric synopses: 'How long a heart attack takes over a hundred meters, how heavy a spider’s life weighs, why a sad man writes to the cruel river, and what magic the comrade-in-chief of the unfinished can work.'" In fact, at the end of each chapter I went back and checked if everything was included. Sometimes it isn't - deliberately.
The first half or so is a fairly straight-forward tale of a boy of unspecified age growing up in pre-war Yugoslavia. Here, it's the language that carries the novel - whimsical non-collocations and lists half a page long, no quotation marks but rapidly changing perspectives, stories upon stories. And the critics that don't like it say it's Balkan kitsch. They might be right - the rural summer party with a table groaning with hearty food and slivovitz, the enraged husbands, the speeches at grandad's funeral. You can often hear the accordeons in your minds ear - and in fact there is an actual band playing brass instruments every now and then. But the narrator Aleksandar Krsmanovic - a thinly veiled Saša himself - is a born storyteller, packaging all the everyday dramas into melodramas, adding just that little bit of technicolour to life.
And then comes the war. For Aleksandar, the war is a bit like a Kammerspiel - it takes place in a single setting, the cellar and corridors of his housing block. The soldiers arrive - sitting down at the impromptu communal dining table and asking what's for tea. The horror is never spoken out loud, we leave the room or close our eyes along with the narrator every time something bad threatens to happen. He protects a Muslim girl from the countryside seeking shelter in the building, then wanders the empty streets with his best friend and forgets about her again. As events reach a crescendo, the family packs up and leaves - a sudden interruption that divides the book into two.
The second part has another contents page, a very different style, and is almost a book about the book. This is where you realise that Stanišic studied creative writing on the renowned Leipzig University course - which has been churning out well-read young writers for a few years now. He didn't graduate, incidentally - too busy being a feted literary starlet. This is where the narrator, or Stanišic himself, grows up. In this section, Yugoslavia is no longer the paradise of the first half, peopled by smocked Titoists and emotional drunks. Whereas the harbingers of war were almost too subtle to notice before, now they are everywhere. We see the real events, no longer swathed in kitsch - or do we? Because Aleksandar is still the inveterate storyteller - only now, instead of his magic wand that makes everything better, "someone should invent an honest plane, which can rasp off the lies from the stories and the delusions from the memories. I am a collector of shavings."
Aleksandar returns to Bosnia from Germany, visiting his grandmother and his old home town. He searches for the little Muslim girl, but is she real or just a device in a plotline? In this second half, Stanisic really plays with his readers, picking up on countless tiny details from the first part, describing various possible realities, turning facts on their heads - the one that got away, the football match between the lines. The humour turns from light to dark, the characters from glittering to down-to-earth. Whereas before, I gladly suspended my disbelief, now that disbelief is the whole point. It felt like I had gone back to Bosnia with Aleksandar and been just as shocked by all the things I had refused to see beforehand. That, I think, is one of the great strengths of the book.
And although the structure of the second half could be tighter, I really think the book deserves to be a hit in English, as it has in German. As long as people can get past the Balkan kitsch.
Update: I finally found the outcome to that little cultural misunderstanding in Summer Holiday. Now that's Balkan kitsch.
First off, although I have friends and acquaintances from various former Yugoslavian states, my entire "knowledge" of the culture is based on Cliff Richard's Summer Holiday and Kurt Held's book Die Rote Zora. Incidentally, this is an absolute classic German children's book, written by a disillusioned Communist in Swiss exile and published under a pseudonym in 1941. It seems to have been published in English back in 1967 under the title The Outsiders of Uskoken Castle, translated by Lynn Aubrey. Time for a rediscovery, I feel, especially after the gorgeous film recently made of it. Bloomsbury, could Zora be the new Harry Potter?
But back to the soldier and the gramophone. Now I haven't read the translation, obviously, but I thoroughly enjoyed the original. I even enjoyed the meandering titles that got Stewart's goat - and which Ross Benjamin describes in Bookforum as "playfully mimic(ing) Cervantes and Grimmelshausen by providing brief, tantalizingly eccentric synopses: 'How long a heart attack takes over a hundred meters, how heavy a spider’s life weighs, why a sad man writes to the cruel river, and what magic the comrade-in-chief of the unfinished can work.'" In fact, at the end of each chapter I went back and checked if everything was included. Sometimes it isn't - deliberately.
The first half or so is a fairly straight-forward tale of a boy of unspecified age growing up in pre-war Yugoslavia. Here, it's the language that carries the novel - whimsical non-collocations and lists half a page long, no quotation marks but rapidly changing perspectives, stories upon stories. And the critics that don't like it say it's Balkan kitsch. They might be right - the rural summer party with a table groaning with hearty food and slivovitz, the enraged husbands, the speeches at grandad's funeral. You can often hear the accordeons in your minds ear - and in fact there is an actual band playing brass instruments every now and then. But the narrator Aleksandar Krsmanovic - a thinly veiled Saša himself - is a born storyteller, packaging all the everyday dramas into melodramas, adding just that little bit of technicolour to life.
And then comes the war. For Aleksandar, the war is a bit like a Kammerspiel - it takes place in a single setting, the cellar and corridors of his housing block. The soldiers arrive - sitting down at the impromptu communal dining table and asking what's for tea. The horror is never spoken out loud, we leave the room or close our eyes along with the narrator every time something bad threatens to happen. He protects a Muslim girl from the countryside seeking shelter in the building, then wanders the empty streets with his best friend and forgets about her again. As events reach a crescendo, the family packs up and leaves - a sudden interruption that divides the book into two.
The second part has another contents page, a very different style, and is almost a book about the book. This is where you realise that Stanišic studied creative writing on the renowned Leipzig University course - which has been churning out well-read young writers for a few years now. He didn't graduate, incidentally - too busy being a feted literary starlet. This is where the narrator, or Stanišic himself, grows up. In this section, Yugoslavia is no longer the paradise of the first half, peopled by smocked Titoists and emotional drunks. Whereas the harbingers of war were almost too subtle to notice before, now they are everywhere. We see the real events, no longer swathed in kitsch - or do we? Because Aleksandar is still the inveterate storyteller - only now, instead of his magic wand that makes everything better, "someone should invent an honest plane, which can rasp off the lies from the stories and the delusions from the memories. I am a collector of shavings."
Aleksandar returns to Bosnia from Germany, visiting his grandmother and his old home town. He searches for the little Muslim girl, but is she real or just a device in a plotline? In this second half, Stanisic really plays with his readers, picking up on countless tiny details from the first part, describing various possible realities, turning facts on their heads - the one that got away, the football match between the lines. The humour turns from light to dark, the characters from glittering to down-to-earth. Whereas before, I gladly suspended my disbelief, now that disbelief is the whole point. It felt like I had gone back to Bosnia with Aleksandar and been just as shocked by all the things I had refused to see beforehand. That, I think, is one of the great strengths of the book.
And although the structure of the second half could be tighter, I really think the book deserves to be a hit in English, as it has in German. As long as people can get past the Balkan kitsch.
Update: I finally found the outcome to that little cultural misunderstanding in Summer Holiday. Now that's Balkan kitsch.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)