The delightful and very talented writer Gisa Klönne has been awarded one of German-language crime literature's greatest honours - the Friedrich Glauser Prize. The award is for her novel Nacht ohne Schatten, the third in a series featuring the poorly matched Cologne detectives Judith Krieger and Manni Korzilius. In fact, the first won Klönne the Glauser Prize for best crime debut in 2006.
I've read the first two novels and they're probably the books I most frequently lend to friends. Excellent intelligent crime fiction with a social conscience, magnificent characters, well written in general - and tense throughout.
The lifetime achievement-type award went to Hans-Werner Kettenbach, whose Black Ice and David's Revenge are published in English by Bitter Lemon Press. And Lucie Klassen scooped best debut for Der 13. Brief.
Thursday, 14 May 2009
Wednesday, 13 May 2009
Apostoloff
It’s taken me a long time to post this review. That’s because I was savouring the book. Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s novel Apostoloff won the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair back in March – and deservedly so, if you ask me.
It’s a road movie of sorts, of the slow-moving kind; no car chases or police sirens here. Two sisters are being driven around Bulgaria by the Apostoloff of the title. The younger of the two, the narrator, hates everything about the country, pouring scorn on the greasy food, the ugly architecture, the tasteless hairstyles, the despotic history; you name it, she criticises it. Everywhere they go turns out to be a disappointment, feeding the narrator’s glee at finding fault. For Bulgaria is the sisters’ father-land; their father left the country for Stuttgart in the mid-1940s and married their blonde German mother. A popular gynaecologist with all the outward signs of success, he committed suicide when the girls were young.
All this is revealed early on; what the novel explores is the sisters’ childhood in Stuttgart’s tiny Bulgarian-German community, their lives since then and of course their relationship to Bulgaria and their father. The plot is held together by a slightly farcical framework – the last of Stuttgart’s post-war Bulgarians has gathered the next generation together on a luxurious trip to the homeland to rebury their dead. The final act is a symbolic burial, as it turns out part of an elaborate PR campaign for the organiser’s new business venture.
There are two things I particularly liked about the novel. The first is the precise and sardonic language, neatly expressing the narrator’s almost malevolent public character: “The wind rose of patriphobia swirls up many a spark of patriphilia, I say inaudibly to my sister as we leave behind us the red dust clouds of the Kremikovsky metallurgy combine, once a child of Bulgarian-Soviet friendship.”
And the other is the fact that there is no saccharine closure; the sisters do not come to terms with their father’s suicide. True, they do unearth some unknown sides of their family history and find a genuine Bulgarian beauty spot in Plovdiv. Yet there is no forgiveness – the last emotion in the book is still hate.
This is a book to be read slowly, a book that shows the ugliest side of a post-communist country from an outsider’s point of view. There are various well-drawn minor characters, including the terribly likeable eponymous driver, and the two sisters come across as very credible as they struggle with their emotions. And yet there were times it made me laugh out loud, often at the sheer wickedness of the narrator’s commentary.
Interestingly, I note the translation rights have been sold to Bulgaria.
It’s a road movie of sorts, of the slow-moving kind; no car chases or police sirens here. Two sisters are being driven around Bulgaria by the Apostoloff of the title. The younger of the two, the narrator, hates everything about the country, pouring scorn on the greasy food, the ugly architecture, the tasteless hairstyles, the despotic history; you name it, she criticises it. Everywhere they go turns out to be a disappointment, feeding the narrator’s glee at finding fault. For Bulgaria is the sisters’ father-land; their father left the country for Stuttgart in the mid-1940s and married their blonde German mother. A popular gynaecologist with all the outward signs of success, he committed suicide when the girls were young.
All this is revealed early on; what the novel explores is the sisters’ childhood in Stuttgart’s tiny Bulgarian-German community, their lives since then and of course their relationship to Bulgaria and their father. The plot is held together by a slightly farcical framework – the last of Stuttgart’s post-war Bulgarians has gathered the next generation together on a luxurious trip to the homeland to rebury their dead. The final act is a symbolic burial, as it turns out part of an elaborate PR campaign for the organiser’s new business venture.
There are two things I particularly liked about the novel. The first is the precise and sardonic language, neatly expressing the narrator’s almost malevolent public character: “The wind rose of patriphobia swirls up many a spark of patriphilia, I say inaudibly to my sister as we leave behind us the red dust clouds of the Kremikovsky metallurgy combine, once a child of Bulgarian-Soviet friendship.”
And the other is the fact that there is no saccharine closure; the sisters do not come to terms with their father’s suicide. True, they do unearth some unknown sides of their family history and find a genuine Bulgarian beauty spot in Plovdiv. Yet there is no forgiveness – the last emotion in the book is still hate.
This is a book to be read slowly, a book that shows the ugliest side of a post-communist country from an outsider’s point of view. There are various well-drawn minor characters, including the terribly likeable eponymous driver, and the two sisters come across as very credible as they struggle with their emotions. And yet there were times it made me laugh out loud, often at the sheer wickedness of the narrator’s commentary.
Interestingly, I note the translation rights have been sold to Bulgaria.
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.
Saturday, 9 May 2009
Bell vs. Hofmann for Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize
Two eminent translators from German are shortlisted for this year's Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize: Anthea Bell for Sasa Stanisic's How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, and Michael Hofmann for Fred Wander's The Seventh Well.
The other translators on the list are:
David Colmer for Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin
Sarah Death for Alexander Ahndoril's The Director
Christine Donougher for Sylvie Germain's Magnus
Marek Tomin for Emil Hakl's Of Kids and Parents.
Is it very churlish of me to say that Bell and Hofmann, while both excellent translators, already have a number of awards clogging up their mantlepieces? If you ask me, it would be great to honour a translator who doesn't yet have their own Wikipedia entry.
Update: A reader has kindly pointed out that this is a load of tosh. Of course the award should go to the best piece of work, regardless of who did it. May the best translator win!
The other translators on the list are:
David Colmer for Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin
Sarah Death for Alexander Ahndoril's The Director
Christine Donougher for Sylvie Germain's Magnus
Marek Tomin for Emil Hakl's Of Kids and Parents.
Is it very churlish of me to say that Bell and Hofmann, while both excellent translators, already have a number of awards clogging up their mantlepieces? If you ask me, it would be great to honour a translator who doesn't yet have their own Wikipedia entry.
Update: A reader has kindly pointed out that this is a load of tosh. Of course the award should go to the best piece of work, regardless of who did it. May the best translator win!
Wednesday, 6 May 2009
Der heilige Eddy
I've just finished reading Jakob Arjouni's latest, Der heilige Eddy. And what a treat it was, of the quick fix, ignore your family duties, find a comfy corner and get stuck in, only surfacing to laugh out loud kind.
Holy Eddy is a busker, playing Clash covers with his mate Arkadi. Plus he's a small-time conman, relieving tourists of their wallets and coats and bitter middle-aged women of large sums of money. Oh, and he accidentally happens to - well, no, not actually cause but at the very least witness the death of Berlin's most despised multi-millionaire (the magnificently named Horst the Bratwurst King).
I won't reveal much more, because the ramshackle plot - with plenty of twists and turns but not an inch of superfluous material - is very much part of the fun. Suffice to say, there's a love story and a neat happy ending. The characters are swiftly drawn, but Eddy in particular sees through them all, playing a mental game of scissors-paper-stone as he guesses what people want him to think they're thinking and plays for the upper hand.
And the book is another of those literary love letters to Berlin I so much enjoy, with the action careering from Kreuzberg 61 to the Kempinski Hotel to Charlottenburg Palace and back again. It reminded me rather of Raul Zelik's Berliner Verhältnisse, another story of loveable losers in Kreuzberg. Zelik and Arjouni have in common that they fall into that unusual category of German writers who aren't scared to include "minority" characters. So here we have a Russian Jew who doesn't care about religion - except when he does - a rebellious Asian-American-Neukölln heiress and a thoroughly dislikeable "poisonous poof". And yet it doesn't read as if Arjouni were just ticking the political correctness boxes - more like the "minority" nature of the characters is essential for the plot and the book's aesthetic.
It's a teensy bit throwaway, I have to admit, but it captures that "Berlin as it is right now" feeling very well indeed. Not bad for a man who lives in the South of France, eh? And it's not unlike a Guy Ritchie film, only without the gory bits and flashy camerawork - if Guy Ritchie were ever to make a film over here, that is. A great little read to put you in the mood for springtime in Berlin.
Holy Eddy is a busker, playing Clash covers with his mate Arkadi. Plus he's a small-time conman, relieving tourists of their wallets and coats and bitter middle-aged women of large sums of money. Oh, and he accidentally happens to - well, no, not actually cause but at the very least witness the death of Berlin's most despised multi-millionaire (the magnificently named Horst the Bratwurst King).
I won't reveal much more, because the ramshackle plot - with plenty of twists and turns but not an inch of superfluous material - is very much part of the fun. Suffice to say, there's a love story and a neat happy ending. The characters are swiftly drawn, but Eddy in particular sees through them all, playing a mental game of scissors-paper-stone as he guesses what people want him to think they're thinking and plays for the upper hand.
And the book is another of those literary love letters to Berlin I so much enjoy, with the action careering from Kreuzberg 61 to the Kempinski Hotel to Charlottenburg Palace and back again. It reminded me rather of Raul Zelik's Berliner Verhältnisse, another story of loveable losers in Kreuzberg. Zelik and Arjouni have in common that they fall into that unusual category of German writers who aren't scared to include "minority" characters. So here we have a Russian Jew who doesn't care about religion - except when he does - a rebellious Asian-American-Neukölln heiress and a thoroughly dislikeable "poisonous poof". And yet it doesn't read as if Arjouni were just ticking the political correctness boxes - more like the "minority" nature of the characters is essential for the plot and the book's aesthetic.
It's a teensy bit throwaway, I have to admit, but it captures that "Berlin as it is right now" feeling very well indeed. Not bad for a man who lives in the South of France, eh? And it's not unlike a Guy Ritchie film, only without the gory bits and flashy camerawork - if Guy Ritchie were ever to make a film over here, that is. A great little read to put you in the mood for springtime in Berlin.
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
Clemens Meyer and the Quite Good Translation
David Varno reports on Words Without Borders on the PEN World Voices reading in New York I would most like to have attended - Clemens Meyer (sadly minus Antje Rávic Strubel and Zaia Alexander) on writing in reunified Germany. Meyer read from a translation by yours truly, and it feels very odd to read someone else mention that fact.
It sounds like Meyer was on fine form - and you can read about some of his other adventures in the USA (in German) at his FAZ blog.
Looks like the title of the translation needs changing, though. And I wish I'd known Meyer was such a fan of Traven's Das Totenschiff, which made a huge impression on me too, and which I think also informed Sherko Fatah's excellent Das dunkle Schiff.
I like the anecdote about the racing commentator. Translating that section was fun. I researched it by going to the races at Hoppegarten (although I'm normally more of a Karlshorst kinda girl) and watching hours of horseracing on Youtube. Then I tested it out at our no man's land translation lab here in Berlin (every first Tuesday of the month). I hope the result matched up to some extent.
Let's hope Varno gets a chance to read more of Clemens Meyer in English in future.
It sounds like Meyer was on fine form - and you can read about some of his other adventures in the USA (in German) at his FAZ blog.
Looks like the title of the translation needs changing, though. And I wish I'd known Meyer was such a fan of Traven's Das Totenschiff, which made a huge impression on me too, and which I think also informed Sherko Fatah's excellent Das dunkle Schiff.
I like the anecdote about the racing commentator. Translating that section was fun. I researched it by going to the races at Hoppegarten (although I'm normally more of a Karlshorst kinda girl) and watching hours of horseracing on Youtube. Then I tested it out at our no man's land translation lab here in Berlin (every first Tuesday of the month). I hope the result matched up to some extent.
Let's hope Varno gets a chance to read more of Clemens Meyer in English in future.
Monday, 4 May 2009
Free Readings on Alexanderplatz
If you're particularly inattentive, it may have escaped your attention that 2009 is the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But don't worry, soon all the celebrations and commemorations will be coming out of your ears and you'll be cursing the day Hungary opened its fences. (Although - if they hadn't, it'd be the sixtieth anniversary of the GDR this year, which might even be more of a strain.)
If you're in Berlin, you can catch free readings marking the events of 1989 this coming weekend on Alexanderplatz. This big square, now given over almost entirely to the joys of shopping and getting run over by trams, was where a number of demonstrations took place in the months leading up to November 1989. And as writers actually played a role in the "Peaceful Revolution", with people like Christa Wolf and Christoph Hein speaking at demonstrations and Walter Janka prompting public debate on the sins of the past, it's a nice idea to make readings part of the large open air exhibition marking the anniversary.
It looks like there are some interesting writers on the bill, including Jana Hensel, Cornelia Schleime and Susanne Schädlich.
If you're in Berlin, you can catch free readings marking the events of 1989 this coming weekend on Alexanderplatz. This big square, now given over almost entirely to the joys of shopping and getting run over by trams, was where a number of demonstrations took place in the months leading up to November 1989. And as writers actually played a role in the "Peaceful Revolution", with people like Christa Wolf and Christoph Hein speaking at demonstrations and Walter Janka prompting public debate on the sins of the past, it's a nice idea to make readings part of the large open air exhibition marking the anniversary.
It looks like there are some interesting writers on the bill, including Jana Hensel, Cornelia Schleime and Susanne Schädlich.
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