New Yorker! Get thee to the Krautgarden loft (and the Austrian Cultural Forum)! For literary delights await you.
For the fourth consecutive year, the good people of New York and Leipzig can indulge their reading palates with a selection of the finest young writers from Germany, Austria and the USA, courtesy of the very busy and hard-working Krautgardeners. The fun starts in NY on 4 March, followed by Leipzig on the 13th and 14th. I'll report back on that part at least, although a quick trip to Lower East Side is beyond my means.
Names on the programme include - take a deep breath - Steven Bloom, T. C. Boyle, Michael Connelly, Adam Davies, Junot Diaz, John Griesemer, Christian Hawkey, Aleksandar Hemon, Christopher Kloeble, Thomas Klupp, Benjamin Lebert, Tao Lin, A. Wallis Lloyd, Ralph Martin, Robert Meeropol, Ruth Nestvold, Thomas Pletzinger, Steffen Popp, Verena Roßbacher, Daniela Seel, Clemens Setz, Anya Ulinich, Willy Vlautin, Tod Wodicka, Uljana Wolf, Anna Winger and Ron Winkler.
Incidentally, the ACF's magazine Transforum (great name, huh?) includes wee features on Verena Rossbacher and Clemens Setz. And you can find pieces in English by Thomas Pletzinger and Anna Winger if you scout about a bit on the Berlin Stories website. Winger, Wodicka and Hawkey, by the way, are all at least part-time Berliners, part of the city's burgeoning English-language writing community.
Saturday, 28 February 2009
Friday, 27 February 2009
The Power of German Crime Fiction
The German and Italian papers have seized on a fascinating story. The German crime writer Veit Heinichen lives in Triest, Italy, where he also sets his Commisssario Laurenti detective novels. These are hugely popular in Germany, even being televised, and are also translated into Italian. His latest is just out, entitled Die Ruhe des Stärkeren. I only know this one (as I've seen it on TV), but they seem to be all about murder and corruption and involvement with eastern European gangsters. And they're generally very well received, with Heinichen considered a great intellectual and clever writer.
But that's not what the press is excited about. At some point last week, Heinichen published an open letter in his local left-leaning paper, Il Piccolo. My Italian isn't good enough to find said letter online, but apparently it exposes an unknown serial letter-writer who is attempting to ruin the author's reputation. Over 100 anonymous letters to various people in Triest and elsewhere accuse Heinichen of child abuse, and of political corruption back in Germany. The police have cleared him of all suspicion but have not been able to find the letter-writer over the past year.
Heinichen himself suspects he has angered the nationalist right-wing in Triest, as some of his books explore actual unsolved cases and he has openly supported the city's former liberal government. He is also a vocal contributor to local debates, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Must be a rather strange feeling - a threat but at the same time confirmation that you're at least doing something right. And what a coincidence that the author revealed the case just days after his book came out.
But that's not what the press is excited about. At some point last week, Heinichen published an open letter in his local left-leaning paper, Il Piccolo. My Italian isn't good enough to find said letter online, but apparently it exposes an unknown serial letter-writer who is attempting to ruin the author's reputation. Over 100 anonymous letters to various people in Triest and elsewhere accuse Heinichen of child abuse, and of political corruption back in Germany. The police have cleared him of all suspicion but have not been able to find the letter-writer over the past year.
Heinichen himself suspects he has angered the nationalist right-wing in Triest, as some of his books explore actual unsolved cases and he has openly supported the city's former liberal government. He is also a vocal contributor to local debates, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Must be a rather strange feeling - a threat but at the same time confirmation that you're at least doing something right. And what a coincidence that the author revealed the case just days after his book came out.
Thursday, 26 February 2009
Night Work and Gramophone Vie for Prize
The 16-strong longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize includes two German titles:
Thomas Glavinic's Night Work and Sasa Stanisic's How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. You can read my review of the latter here, and I'll be reading Night Work very soon, as it's been recommended to me a number of times.
My fingers are crossed, as the prize seems to offer a big sales boost in the UK. The shortlist is announced on 1 April, and the winning writer and translator share 1o,ooo pounds (for what that's worth nowadays) plus a big bottle of bubbly.
Thomas Glavinic's Night Work and Sasa Stanisic's How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. You can read my review of the latter here, and I'll be reading Night Work very soon, as it's been recommended to me a number of times.
My fingers are crossed, as the prize seems to offer a big sales boost in the UK. The shortlist is announced on 1 April, and the winning writer and translator share 1o,ooo pounds (for what that's worth nowadays) plus a big bottle of bubbly.
Wednesday, 25 February 2009
Schlink Interview
Bernhard The Reader Schlink gave a fairly interesting interview to the FAZ the other day. No mention of that whole Ilse Koch kerfuffle, by the way. One of the points he does address is misinterpretations of the novel. Schlink comments:
There have been a whole list of crass misinterpretations. As if I thought because Hanna Schmitz is illiterate she isn't guilty. As if I thought you are a moral person as long as you're educated. As if I thought that by learning to read, Hanna Schmitz had understood her guilt and cleared her character. The interesting thing is, these aren't readers' but critics' misinterpretations.
Which I find a little facile - because how on earth does the man know how all his millions of readers understood the book? Not to forget that the author wrote the damn thing and might perhaps have left scope for these interpretations. The interviewer, Andreas Kilb, points out that many of these criticisms came from the USA:
Cynthia Ozick argued that every book about the Holocaust was inescapably a kind of symbolic discourse and every person in it a representative of their nation. Thus Hanna Schmitz can't help standing for all Germans.
Presumably Cynthia Ozick didn't know that part of general knowledge about the Third Reich here is that academics were over-proportionately represented in the mobile killing squads and that Hanna therefore can't be a typical perpetrator. Perhaps she would judge differently now than twelve years ago, when we had far less literature, far fewer films about the Third Reich. In the meantime it goes without saying that the image of the Third Reich is made up of many mosaic pieces. Not every piece has to offer the whole picture.
Well, he's right about the literature on the Third Reich. A colleague commented to me that Schlink's book acted as a kind of watershed, introducing a new approach towards writing about the Holocaust that Böll and Grass would never have taken. And in fact, German-language literature is richer for that. The example that immediately springs to mind is Kevin Vennemann's dense and complex Close to Jedenew, in which a German author reckons with Polish complicity with the Nazis, surely inconceivable twenty years ago. Or to name a title to be published in English in June, Julia Franck's Mittagsfrau (The Blind Side of the Heart), which looks at the devastating decision taken by a Jewish woman living under a false identity to abandon her child at the end of the war, a rather complex moral issue. And for that at least I am grateful to Schlink.
At least now Kate Winslet has her Oscar we may have a little peace on the whole Reader front though.
There have been a whole list of crass misinterpretations. As if I thought because Hanna Schmitz is illiterate she isn't guilty. As if I thought you are a moral person as long as you're educated. As if I thought that by learning to read, Hanna Schmitz had understood her guilt and cleared her character. The interesting thing is, these aren't readers' but critics' misinterpretations.
Which I find a little facile - because how on earth does the man know how all his millions of readers understood the book? Not to forget that the author wrote the damn thing and might perhaps have left scope for these interpretations. The interviewer, Andreas Kilb, points out that many of these criticisms came from the USA:
Cynthia Ozick argued that every book about the Holocaust was inescapably a kind of symbolic discourse and every person in it a representative of their nation. Thus Hanna Schmitz can't help standing for all Germans.
Presumably Cynthia Ozick didn't know that part of general knowledge about the Third Reich here is that academics were over-proportionately represented in the mobile killing squads and that Hanna therefore can't be a typical perpetrator. Perhaps she would judge differently now than twelve years ago, when we had far less literature, far fewer films about the Third Reich. In the meantime it goes without saying that the image of the Third Reich is made up of many mosaic pieces. Not every piece has to offer the whole picture.
Well, he's right about the literature on the Third Reich. A colleague commented to me that Schlink's book acted as a kind of watershed, introducing a new approach towards writing about the Holocaust that Böll and Grass would never have taken. And in fact, German-language literature is richer for that. The example that immediately springs to mind is Kevin Vennemann's dense and complex Close to Jedenew, in which a German author reckons with Polish complicity with the Nazis, surely inconceivable twenty years ago. Or to name a title to be published in English in June, Julia Franck's Mittagsfrau (The Blind Side of the Heart), which looks at the devastating decision taken by a Jewish woman living under a false identity to abandon her child at the end of the war, a rather complex moral issue. And for that at least I am grateful to Schlink.
At least now Kate Winslet has her Oscar we may have a little peace on the whole Reader front though.
Friday, 20 February 2009
A Suitcase Full of Mann
Berlin's Akademie der Künste is currently exhibiting facsimiles of Heinrich Mann's correspondence. Nut just any old correspondence, mind, but letters found in a suitcase in Prague. Mann's daughter Leonie had left it with friends when she fled the city in 1968 - and then seems to have forgotten about it. The case contained 16 letters from Heinrich Mann, 91 letters to him and various other personal documents. 48 of the letters were written by the French Germanist Félix Bertaux from 1922 to 1928.
The case was found and handed over nearly five years ago, but the Czech government considered it had a claim to the documents and has only now released them for use. Now researchers are hoping to find forgotten suitcases from Heinrich Mann's hurried escape from Berlin in 1933 - so if you live in Uhlandstraße you might want to check in the cellar. Michael Lentz' novel Pazifik Exil, incidentally, describes a later stage of Mann's journey from France to the USA - most amusingly - as well as the lives of Franz Werfel, Thomas Mann, Arnold Schönberg and Leon Feuchtwanger in their, um, Pacific exile. But Lentz doesn't seem to know where that other elusive suitcase went either.
The case was found and handed over nearly five years ago, but the Czech government considered it had a claim to the documents and has only now released them for use. Now researchers are hoping to find forgotten suitcases from Heinrich Mann's hurried escape from Berlin in 1933 - so if you live in Uhlandstraße you might want to check in the cellar. Michael Lentz' novel Pazifik Exil, incidentally, describes a later stage of Mann's journey from France to the USA - most amusingly - as well as the lives of Franz Werfel, Thomas Mann, Arnold Schönberg and Leon Feuchtwanger in their, um, Pacific exile. But Lentz doesn't seem to know where that other elusive suitcase went either.
Thursday, 19 February 2009
Digital Bohemia Goes China
An informer sent me a book. He said he thought I’d like it - it’s travel writing by a guy who makes his way across China on his own. Which rather confused me. Why on earth would I enjoy reading travel writing by a guy making his way across China on his own? This is not a genre with which I’m familiar, I have to admit.
The book, Allein unter 1,3 Milliarden, is by Christian Y. Schmidt – now there’s a man who’s changed his name since the advent of the search engine. That raised my hackles slightly more, as the author is described as Senior Consultant for the Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur (“Operation Enduring Freelance”). This is, I gather, a loose affiliation of creative types for whom the term “digital bohemia” seems to have been invented. They write, they edit, they blog, they organise parties and events, they market things, they produce things, they think deep thoughts about the most humane way for us to work, they feature in Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Diesseits des Van Allen Gürtels, they know all the right hands to shake and are generally hip and groovy people. In short, I’m deeply envious. Another key player, Kathrin Passig, took the Klagenfurt literary competition by storm in 2006 with a short story precisely tailored to the event, Sie befinden sich hier (You Are Here, trans. Lucy Powell). It was her first piece of fiction – and her last, as far as I’m aware. You can read an extract from a non-fiction book by Passig and Sascha Lobo, How to Get Things Done without a Spark of Self-Discipline – a translation that actually demanded a fair amount of self-discipline, to be brutally honest.
So there were a number of hurdles for the book to overcome. But the informer in question is usually pretty reliable, so I gave it a reluctant try.
You know what comes next, right? Yeah yeah, I genuinely enjoyed the damn thing, no matter how much I wanted to hate it. Schmidt starts out as an ex-pat in Peking, married to a Chinese woman and speaking very little Chinese. Plagued by self-loathing and boredom, he decides to set out on his own along the country’s longest road from Shanghai to Kathmandu. By bus. Part of the plan is for Schmidt, a former Maoist from Bielefeld (Germany’s second most boring placeTM), to assimilate along the way, learning the language and actually becoming Chinese. On the road he battles with torrential rain, explores and rejects Buddhism in a single day, hears a million hellos, meets polite punks and bare-chested “Xitele” fans and faces hallucinations and near death by yak.
The author hits just the right note between banal blogger-style commentary and traditional travel writing. He frequently refers back to previous European travellers in China, from Marco Polo to Edmund Hillary. OK, the descriptive passages of landscapes viewed out of bus windows are nothing to write home about. But the character sketches are worth their weight in gold. And maybe it’s just me, but his self-deprecating humour really makes the book. Like when he is appalled to run into a group of German pensioners in the wilds of Tibet, as they spoil the exclusivity of his adventure. Or when he chuckles over the fake US press reviews on a condom packet, explaining: “as semi-barbarians, we (Caucasians) enjoy an excellent reputation in the sexual sector.”
Part of the appeal is the sheer bizarre nature of the author’s quest and the oddities he comes across. But there is more to the book than funny re-hashes of Engrish signs and tales of curious characters (although they’re in there too). Schmidt may be a traveller who doesn’t really speak Chinese but he’s spent some time living in China and Singapore, he’s done his research and he knows his stuff – better in fact than his guide in Tibet. With a certain ironic distance to his former political allegiances, he frequently seeks out traces of the Long March, Chairman Mao and sites of historical events and achievements. And often enough they’re impossible to find between tower blocks and shopping malls, especially if you don’t speak the language. What I found absolutely delightful was the irreverence with which he treats the Dalai Lama, otherwise so unquestioningly idolised by aging pop stars and politicians alike. Daoism is much more his cup of lapsang souchong, with handy hints picked at random from the Dao De Jing guiding his path in indecisive moments.
All this with a reflected, thoughtful and undeniably witty modus operandum:
Through the haze, a shrivelled skeleton staggers towards me. It must be the mummy. In fact, it’s only an incredibly skinny old beggar… So I give him something, partly because I’m already ashamed that I will later use the poor guy in this book for a cheap effect.
My informer was troubled by Schmidt’s uncritical attitude to the ruling party in China. And in fact, the author does seem to have become over-assimilated by the end of the book. Like many an enthusiastic settler, he whitewashes negative aspects of the country’s politics. The trip took place in 2007 during the run-up to the Olympics, and Schmidt faced numerous bureaucratic hurdles while travelling through Tibet. Foreigners need permits to enter Tibet and to leave Lhasa, access to Mount Everest is blocked off for several days – and why? According to the author, because a group of US students unfurled a “Free Tibet” banner at the foot of the mountain. Admittedly perhaps not the most effective form of protest, but Schmidt blames the students for stirring up trouble rather than the Chinese government for overreacting. Alright, the guy wants to carry on living with his wife in Peking, but there are ways and means of expressing criticism that might not get you expelled.
At the end of the day, though, Alone Among 1.3 Billion is about the people rather than the country – the Chinese and Christian Y. Schmidt. And as such, it's well worth reading.
The book, Allein unter 1,3 Milliarden, is by Christian Y. Schmidt – now there’s a man who’s changed his name since the advent of the search engine. That raised my hackles slightly more, as the author is described as Senior Consultant for the Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur (“Operation Enduring Freelance”). This is, I gather, a loose affiliation of creative types for whom the term “digital bohemia” seems to have been invented. They write, they edit, they blog, they organise parties and events, they market things, they produce things, they think deep thoughts about the most humane way for us to work, they feature in Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Diesseits des Van Allen Gürtels, they know all the right hands to shake and are generally hip and groovy people. In short, I’m deeply envious. Another key player, Kathrin Passig, took the Klagenfurt literary competition by storm in 2006 with a short story precisely tailored to the event, Sie befinden sich hier (You Are Here, trans. Lucy Powell). It was her first piece of fiction – and her last, as far as I’m aware. You can read an extract from a non-fiction book by Passig and Sascha Lobo, How to Get Things Done without a Spark of Self-Discipline – a translation that actually demanded a fair amount of self-discipline, to be brutally honest.
So there were a number of hurdles for the book to overcome. But the informer in question is usually pretty reliable, so I gave it a reluctant try.
You know what comes next, right? Yeah yeah, I genuinely enjoyed the damn thing, no matter how much I wanted to hate it. Schmidt starts out as an ex-pat in Peking, married to a Chinese woman and speaking very little Chinese. Plagued by self-loathing and boredom, he decides to set out on his own along the country’s longest road from Shanghai to Kathmandu. By bus. Part of the plan is for Schmidt, a former Maoist from Bielefeld (Germany’s second most boring placeTM), to assimilate along the way, learning the language and actually becoming Chinese. On the road he battles with torrential rain, explores and rejects Buddhism in a single day, hears a million hellos, meets polite punks and bare-chested “Xitele” fans and faces hallucinations and near death by yak.
The author hits just the right note between banal blogger-style commentary and traditional travel writing. He frequently refers back to previous European travellers in China, from Marco Polo to Edmund Hillary. OK, the descriptive passages of landscapes viewed out of bus windows are nothing to write home about. But the character sketches are worth their weight in gold. And maybe it’s just me, but his self-deprecating humour really makes the book. Like when he is appalled to run into a group of German pensioners in the wilds of Tibet, as they spoil the exclusivity of his adventure. Or when he chuckles over the fake US press reviews on a condom packet, explaining: “as semi-barbarians, we (Caucasians) enjoy an excellent reputation in the sexual sector.”
Part of the appeal is the sheer bizarre nature of the author’s quest and the oddities he comes across. But there is more to the book than funny re-hashes of Engrish signs and tales of curious characters (although they’re in there too). Schmidt may be a traveller who doesn’t really speak Chinese but he’s spent some time living in China and Singapore, he’s done his research and he knows his stuff – better in fact than his guide in Tibet. With a certain ironic distance to his former political allegiances, he frequently seeks out traces of the Long March, Chairman Mao and sites of historical events and achievements. And often enough they’re impossible to find between tower blocks and shopping malls, especially if you don’t speak the language. What I found absolutely delightful was the irreverence with which he treats the Dalai Lama, otherwise so unquestioningly idolised by aging pop stars and politicians alike. Daoism is much more his cup of lapsang souchong, with handy hints picked at random from the Dao De Jing guiding his path in indecisive moments.
All this with a reflected, thoughtful and undeniably witty modus operandum:
Through the haze, a shrivelled skeleton staggers towards me. It must be the mummy. In fact, it’s only an incredibly skinny old beggar… So I give him something, partly because I’m already ashamed that I will later use the poor guy in this book for a cheap effect.
My informer was troubled by Schmidt’s uncritical attitude to the ruling party in China. And in fact, the author does seem to have become over-assimilated by the end of the book. Like many an enthusiastic settler, he whitewashes negative aspects of the country’s politics. The trip took place in 2007 during the run-up to the Olympics, and Schmidt faced numerous bureaucratic hurdles while travelling through Tibet. Foreigners need permits to enter Tibet and to leave Lhasa, access to Mount Everest is blocked off for several days – and why? According to the author, because a group of US students unfurled a “Free Tibet” banner at the foot of the mountain. Admittedly perhaps not the most effective form of protest, but Schmidt blames the students for stirring up trouble rather than the Chinese government for overreacting. Alright, the guy wants to carry on living with his wife in Peking, but there are ways and means of expressing criticism that might not get you expelled.
At the end of the day, though, Alone Among 1.3 Billion is about the people rather than the country – the Chinese and Christian Y. Schmidt. And as such, it's well worth reading.
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
Berlin Publishing: habemus accessūs electronicos
I am informed by email - where on earth did they get my address? - that Galiani Berlin now has its own website. Don't they look nice? I'm looking forward to great things from these professional publishing people with a real instinct for great fiction - and will check them out at the Leipzig Book Fair.
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