NYT Goes B

I'm beginning to feel like the FBI, what with all the anonymous tip-offs coming in. So do check out Maureen Freely on translating Orhan Parmuk (not strictly a German book, but thanks anyway) in the Washington Post.

And more pertinently, you can read an interesting article by Nicholas Kulish, former Krautgarden participant, author of Last One In and NYT Berlin correspondent, on the writing and readings culture in Berlin. For the "cultured traveller", heh heh. What I found interesting was the gossip on Adler & Söhne, an office shared by seven writers in Prenzlauer Berg - including Kulish's buddy Thomas Pletzinger (Funeral of a Dog is forthcoming in English, trans. Ross Benjamin) and Sasa Stanisic (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize with How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, trans. Anthea Bell). Kulish writes:

Seven young writers, including Mr. Pletzinger, rented a space in the former eastern part of the city to challenge the notion that their profession is, by necessity, a solitary one. They opened a storefront where they can work side by side, calling it Adler & Söhne Literaturproduktion, a kind of highbrow sweatshop for the stitching together of sentences.

Nice. The idea that the shop might once have housed the tobacconist who sold Heiner Müller his cigars says a lot about urban development in Berlin - including the fact that those who unwittingly profit from the changes feel nostalgic for what was there before. Brecht's tobacconist on Chausseestraße also went bust a few years ago. I believe that shop is also now an office, but I'll check in the morning.

Update: The former tobacconist on Chausseestraße is now some kind of mysterious gallery or office space with frosted glass windowpanes. The former academic bookshop is empty and the former Bookshop in the Brecht House is a bistro selling fresh pasta and wine, having given up the idea of being an upmarket (and rather rude) newsagent's. What would Helene Weigel say?

Das Fremde und das Eigene

Berlin's Literaturwerkstatt has been running an interesting small series of events under the above title. The phrase is rather popular but difficult to translate. My trusty Muret-Sanders offers about six column inches of translations for "fremd": strange, foreign, exotic, other people's, extraneous, outside, other, alien... "Eigen" is fairly clear-cut, at least superficially, meaning "one's own". But what is foreign and domestic in literature? What is exotic and familiar? What is extrinsic and intrinsic?

The first event in the series was held at the Social Democratic research institute in Berlin and was a pretty heavyweight affair. It started with a panel discussion between politicians, researchers and "migrant authors" - Imre Török and Zafer Senocak, in this case. Although the discussion was fairly rambling, it soon emerged that nobody is happy with the labels applied to literature written in German by authors with other cultural backgrounds.

One of the key issues for the series is how mainstream literary culture reflects minorities, and indeed the last event will be about German-language literature's difficulties with homosexuality. The panel discussion touched rather briefly on this subject, with the researcher Meral Cerci explaining how other media have actually begun including ethnic and sexual minorities - the Turkish motorway cop, the gay neighbour, and so on. In literature, it seems, that's something reserved for the minorities themselves. Write what you know, they say, and it looks like many German authors don't know many people outside of their own demographic.

The discussion was followed by a reading by four top-notch authors, which I found more productive than the first half. Sherko Fatah, Terezia Mora and Zafer Senocak more than proved that their writing is of excellent quality, wherever they happen to come from, and Michael Wildenhain played the role of the token German, the exception that proves the rule. They were all agreed that they have definitively "arrived" slap-bang in the literary establishment, earning prizes and grants galore.

This week saw the second event, which focused on writing in German as a foreign language. The authors were not quite as established, with stronger accents and (for the most part) less experience. Maria Cecilia Barbetta, Abbas Khider, Orsolya Kalasz and Pedro Kadivar read from their prose and poetry and talked about the freedoms and confines of writing in German. Kadivar, who also writes in French, touched on the controversy over Francophone literature - an issue that has a different weighting in Germany, which never had colonies to speak of.

The presenter, Professor Doktor Norbert Dittmar, was better than I had expected from his slightly embarrassing performance at the first event. He's an expert on second-language acquisition and so comes at the issue from a certain direction - which was absolutely inappropriate on the initial panel but seemed more fitting here. Very affirmative and congratulatory in a way that bordered on the patronising - what a great achievement it is to write literature in German, how well the authors have done, etc. If you're familiar with Zafer Senocak, you can imagine how well that went down with him, but he grinned and bore it. What I did approve of was Dittmar's rejection of the standard labels and insistence on the fact that the authors write German-language literature, period.

It turned out to be a positive evening, if not all that insightful - but if I hear one more person comparing the German language to a lover in the near future I won't be able to account for my actions.

The Rise and Rise of Elke Heidenreich

I've written about La Heidenreich before, the "most influential woman in German culture". Just when her star seemed to be waning - she got the sack from her TV show and the click rating or whatever it's called for the internet version was pretty unimpressive - she's back in the headlines again. Heidenreich has launched the first season of her own imprint, pithily named Edition Elke Heidenreich, combining literature and music in four Heidenreich-esque publications. They look like beautifully made books: two non-fiction titles, a Tuscany novel by Günther Freitag and a re-release of Franz Werfel's Roman der Oper from 1923 (published in English as Verdi. A Novel of the Opera).

Watch out for advertising spreads in Brigitte, the women's magazine that shifts more books than any other publication, and the more masculine mustachio'd press.

Dear Charlotte Roche,

How's things? I hear Wetlands is doing pretty well in the UK, if not quite matching up to the huge German sales figures. But still not bad for a translation. And coming out in the US in a couple of weeks, eh? That should be exciting. Will you be going over to promote the launch?

Anyway, I thought I'd call your attention to a couple of reviews from North America. The first is by a Canadian sex columnist, who likes the book. The best thing about it, though, is that the reviewer's name is Josey Vogels and it's published in the National Post's "Afterword" column - now I know you're giggling at that.

And I really recommend you read this, the most rambling and entertaining and philosophical review I have yet read of the book (by Justin E. H. Smith in N1BR). I think you'll find it funny and revealing, if not particularly flattering. And cheaper than a shrink. You'll be especially tickled by the guy's bemusement at the downright (or upright) healthiness of young Germans' sexuality and his comments on the proto-Germanic nature of English swearwords.

And you probably know the Complete Review's review, which has been out there a while now. But just in case, it's a good one too. And they keep comparing it to The Kindly Ones, funnily enough.

Anyway, keep your pecker up and carry on camping.

All the best,

Katy

Liverpudlian Lesefest

For the spontaneous: tonight sees a reading by the German author Maike Wetzel at Liverpool's Bluecoat - the last in a series launching her short story collection Long Days in English (trans. Lyn Marven).

It's been a while since I read the book (in German), but one story still stands out in my mind, a moving tale of a girl watching her sister live through anorexia. Wetzel seems to have an eye for psychological detail in everyday life, and as far as I recall her stories are fairly universal. But as you can tell, I'm struggling here. Just wanted to tell you about the reading so you can go along, really.

Sorry

I mentioned some time ago that Zoran Drvenkar's novel Sorry was one of the books I was looking forward to at the start of this year. The publishers have gone to a lot of trouble to advertise it (including the flashy microsite linked above) and it seems to have worked very well - Drvenkar is pretty much everywhere you look at the moment.

The book is billed as a "thriller like a bad dream", and I'd say that sums it up rather well. I'm a big fan of his children's books and enjoyed Drvenkar's debut novel for adults, Du bist zu schnell, because it's the story of a fucked-up kid who sees things - or does she? – and it really messed with my mind. As did Sorry, which I suppose must be a good thing.

The book is about a group of friends who set up an agency for apologies - hence the title. But then someone commissions them to apologise to a corpse. And to get rid of the body on his behalf. Drvenkar has set the book firmly in Berlin, but it's a city with a raw underbelly of violence and child abuse. The author throws up questions about guilt and innocence, right and wrong. In an interview with the booksellers' mag Börsenblatt, he says writing the book really took it out of him. I can only say that reading it wasn't exactly a walk in the park, either.

Drvenkar constructs the novel very cleverly, playing hide and seek with the reader. Some sections are narrated in the first person, some address the reader directly as "you" - sucking you in to the kind of action I for one didn't want to feel involved in. Some of it is in the third person, but you still don't always know who's who. The characters we can identify are like old friends - lovingly sketched with all their faults. And the characters we can't identify are incredibly threatening.

This is, as everyone seems to agree, an extraordinarily good thriller in the style of the American greats. It works as a piece of well thought-out literature as well. But what it really excels at is churning up your insides as you read about murder and child abuse. There were a number of times I felt genuinely sick to my stomach - not because Drvenkar describes physical abuse; he pans out at key moments there. But because he details the psychological side of it, the continuities, the perverse ties between victims and perpetrators. In the interview, he closes:

What adults do to each other is a book of its own, but what they do to children is an affront to life itself in my eyes. There is no excuse for child abuse.

That message certainly comes across in Sorry. Not for the weak-stomached.

Prizes Prizes Prizes

I received an anonymous tip-off that three former East German writers are to share the €60,000 National Prize, awarded by the liberal-conservative Deutsche Nationalstiftung. According to big bod Kurt Biedenkopf, the three "promote our mutual awareness of history and a sympathetic feeling of being a single nation (Wir-Gefühl) in an exemplary way." The authors in question are Erich Loest, 83, Monika Maron, 68, and German Book Prize winner Uwe Tellkamp, 40 - thus showering money on three generations of writers who work towards the foundation's goal of "promoting the national identity of the Germans in a united Europe" by explaining the former East Germany for readers who never experienced it first hand.

Tonight also sees the awards ceremony for Berlin's Fontane Prize, worth €15,000, which goes to the lovely and very trinkfest Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Various other artists including Dietmar Dath also get € 5000 each. Berlin - poor but sexy, eh? According to the jury, "Emine Sevgi Özdamar is an example that the consequence of differences meeting up is not necessarily a levelling, but that a mixture of different ways of thinking, speaking and feeling can create something new that is of profit for both sides." You can read a number of her novels in English, most recently The Bridge of the Golden Horn (trans. Martin Chalmers, a man who knows a thousand songs and a good few pubs).

And then of course there was the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair last week. The three winners each get €15,000 too, and I was there to see the ceremony. The translation award went to Eike Schönfeld, looking very dapper as always, for his translation of Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift. I was a bit nonplussed by the laudatory speech, in which a critic spent more time talking about Saul Bellow than the translation. Schönfeld has a lot of translations and re-translations under his belt and proclaimed loudly that he doesn't like to read books through before he starts work on them - that maintains the element of surprise and is a darn sight quicker too. The non-fiction award went to the beardy historian Herfried Münkler for Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen. And the fiction prize to Sibylle Lewitscharoff for Apostoloff, an apparently wickedly funny anti-Bulgaria novel that is at the top of my pile.

Interestingly enough, Daniel Kehlmann, who was also nominated for the prize and was one of the writers who complained about the terrible pressure of such occasions last year in the run-up to the German Book Prize, didn't attend the announcements ceremony. I also spotted a heavily bearded Andreas Maier slipping out just seconds after the fiction winner was announced. Ulrich Greiner, literary editor of DIE ZEIT, even referred to the criticism of pitting authors against each other for awards in his opening speech. He pointed out that these big prizes are a way to publicise good books independently of advertising budgets - although a look at the nominees shows that small publishers don't get a look-in either way. Having slipped into the VIP area after the deed was done thanks to an attractive friend and two sets of batted eyelashes, I can at least confirm that hanging with the big guns isn't as spectacular or interesting as it looks from the other side of the cordon. But at least you get to drown your sorrows for free if you don't win.