Sorry To Bang On About David Wagner*

I feel like I'm banging my own drum rather a lot right now, but in this case it's also David Wagner's drum, so maybe it's OK. There are three new David-Wagner-in-English things to share:

Kate Müser did an interview with him for Deutsche Welle about his relationship to Berlin, and also recommends Berlin Triptych and three other great German books in English translation.

Monocle 24 Radio is airing a piece by Susan Stone about David (and Berlin, and me, and Readux Books) at 8 p.m. CET on Monday 25 August on their Culture programme. They'll repeat it a couple of times after that (find it in their schedule).

And if you're in Berlin, you lucky person you, you can catch David and me live in person at a reading on Saturday, 13 September, with Eliot Weinberger and Maren Kames, at the Circus Hostel. Here's the pretty flyer. See you there, then.

*I've just capitalized every word in the headline. Everything else looked odd and required too much consideration of grammar. I know it's not correct but I'm very tired today.

David Wagner David Wagner David Wagner!

A triple-luscious serving of top German writer David Wagner today, on the occasion of it being Wednesday. There's my translation of his ode to the Mauerpark now online at Slow Travel Berlin, there's a piece taken from Berlin Triptych now online at Berfrois, and an exciting slice of news: David Wagner has won the super-duper-twenty-thousand-euro Kranichsteiner Literaturpreis, for generally being really good at writing (also my friend Deniz Utlu gets one of their three prizes for emerging writers, says the trade paper Börsenblatt).

I would say that Mr David Wagner owes me a drink. Happy Wagner Wednesday, everyone.

New Readux Series/Arthur Eloesser

Readux Books have announced their new series of teeny tiny literary treats. The four titles this time are Cities and City People: Berlin 1919 by Arthur Eloesser, trans. Isabel Cole, essays documenting the city on the cusp of change; Berlin Triptych by David Wagner, trans. Katy Derbyshire (that's me), more recent pieces on change in Berlin; Where the Hollyhocks Come From by Amanda Svensson, trans. Saskia Vogel, a coming-of-age story from Sweden; and Hong Kong Buffet by Brittani Sonnenberg – Americana and sweet-and-sour pork in many voices.

Lisa Schweizer designed the beautifully textured covers, and there'll be a launch party featuring all the (living) writers at the Vagabund Brauerei on 2 July. That's correct, Readux are organizing a piss-up at a brewery. Books are available to pre-order now and will be delivered from 20 June.

For a special advance treat, you can read one of Isabel's Eloesser translations at B O D Y magazine.

David Wagner: Mauer Park

One of the things people say to me about once a week is that Berlin must have changed a great deal over the past years. Presumably they say this because it's true, but that doesn't make it any easier to find a sensible response other than, yes, it has.

In 2001 David Wagner published a book of exquisitely composed pieces about places in Berlin, now out of print, called In Berlin. They were written for newspapers between 1998 and 2001. And now he's revised the book and brought it out in an updated version as Mauer Park. What we get is all the original pieces, plus extra material from 2013. Wagner revisits the sites he wrote about in the past and describes them as they are now. An empty restaurant that no longer exists, a settlement for sedate travellers where most of the old crew have moved on but left behind their artefacts for those who took their places, an abandoned slaughterhouse area now converted to homes and shopping opportunities. Or one of my favourites, simply a calm philosophical portrait of the Berlin public transport map, a spider's web with a few new threads added over the past decade. It's a book about the city and now also about change and continuation.

There are a couple of themes, most notably architecture and partying, and it's fascinating to follow cafés, clubs and bars through name changes and changes of address and additions to the menu and new kinds of cups as coffee trends move along – and to ask oneself with Wagner whether the "new Berlin" of the 1990s has passed the taste test. But along with the city, the author has aged. Now his daughter comes into the picture now and then, and he can't quite manage to stifle the odd note of regret and nostalgia, even if it's for things he ridiculed back then. The Café Kranzler was a huge, brassy West Berlin monstrosity full of old ladies eating bad cake, but its replacement is even worse, and those nineties clubs in Mitte that recreated smalltown childhoods, ach!

Two things happened to me while I was reading the book. First of all, I decided I really ought to get out more, as I imagined David Wagner visiting and revisiting the kind of places I rarely take note of – the oasis-like Hotel Estrel planted in its desert of Neukölln scrapyards; Schöneberg cafés; Adlershof! And secondly I got homesick (reading on a plane to London) and then couldn't take the beatific smile off my face at the thought of soon being back in Berlin (on the return flight). The final piece was written specifically for the book, and is about the Mauerpark. It's a serenade to that park full of crazies people now talk about all over the world, and it's full of love and admiration for a city and the people who live in it – and even for the people who just come to visit. Wagner writes with a generosity that goes beyond the gut reflex to hate tourists, a knee-jerk reaction so common here. For him, those visitors are part of what makes Berlin the way it is now.

A while ago I wrote about Anglophone visitors writing about Berlin and perpetuating a certain image of the place, those journalistic pieces citing budding microbrewery cultures and proclaiming that "nobody in Berlin" gets up before the afternoon. That's a Berlin I have never really recognized, as I put it then, but it seems like real people are living there so I've tried to find my peace with it, partly by vowing never to read anything about Berlin that is published in New York. Gideon Lewis-Kraus's essay City of Rumor, as it turned out, I did not hate at all. Possibly that's because it's less an attempt to describe his version of Berlin than an exploration of his – and others' – compulsion to do so. I enjoyed his style (I could hear his voice; it's not one you forget) and the way the essay doesn't pretend to be about issues much larger than the writer's own mind. I feel like it helped me to understand the whole phenomenon.

Yet still, Mauer Park is closer to my version of Berlin. Wagner is a long-term visitor; he grew up in West Germany and moved here as a student, like I did. He has a sharp eye for detail and he understands the city's historical layers, can tell genuine patina from tourist tat – although his affection and subtle humour extends to those who deal in it, like the man on Checkpoint Charlie making no pretence that the Leica he's selling is genuine.

To my great delight, Wagner did indeed write about me writing about him when we went out walking together. All that remains is for me to translate it and the solipsistic cycle will be complete. I hope you'll be able to read some of the pieces from the collection in English fairly soon. The book's late launch (it came out in September) is this coming Saturday at the Roter Salon. I'll be there too. If I'm smiling more than usual it'll be because I'm looking back at years of dancing and posing in one of my own favourite clubs. 

Walking with David Wagner

I'm really enjoying my side project, Going Dutch with German Writers. This time I went out drinking walking with David Wagner. The poor guy must get tired of going on walks with people who want to write about the experience, as he's one of those great walker-writers everybody loves. But he didn't let it show.

Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair to David Wagner

I'm back from Leipzig with the not quite fresh news that yes, my favourite book of the season did in fact win the big prize of the season. David Wagner's Leben is king of the German-language fiction castle, and deservedly so. Read my review here to find out what's so amazing about it.

The non-fiction prize went to Helmut Böttiger for Die Gruppe 47, apparently the first serious look back at the Gruppe 47 literary mafia and how its players shaped the German-language literary bizz. And Eva Hesse won the translation prize for her rendering of Ezra Pounds's Cantos. Congratulations!

I don't have much else to report from the book fair. For some reason I didn't go to any parties at all. It was most odd.

David Wagner: Leben

Regular readers may be aware that I'm a fan of David Wagner's writing and that I'd been looking forward to his new book, Leben. Well, I had and I hadn't - because I was worried it might be a rather upsetting read. A friend who knew the beginning had warned me it was rather dark and I'd also got the impression, talking to the author, that the writing process had been quite heavy-going. It's a book - a novel, an essay, a collection of miniatures, autobiographical writing? no matter - a book narrated by a man who gets a liver transplant.

Now allow me to get the cliché out of the way: the Germans are quite fascinated by illnesses, their own and other people's. Don't ask after a German's health if you're afraid of an honest answer. Outside of bathroom fittings, pharmacy frequency and the like, that's manifested in literature too. Kathrin Schmidt won the German Book Prize a few years ago with Du stirbst nicht, a semi-autobiographical account of a woman recovering from an aneurysm. Georg Diez described his mother's cancer in Der Tod meiner Mutter. Arno Geiger wrote about his father's Alzheimer's in Der alte König in seinem Exil. Wolfgang Herrndorf is detailing his life with a brain tumour pretty much in real time on his blog Arbeit und Struktur. All of the above are examples of excellent writing that confronts us with mortality. I'm not sure whether that's still a taboo, but it certainly doesn't make for light reading.

And so to Leben. Did I want to read something like that when I actually vaguely know the writer? I did. But I've been having difficulties writing about the experience.

The book opens with a short sharp shock: the narrator comes home late one night, eats a little something and suddenly starts bringing up blood. He calls an ambulance and goes into intensive care, knowing this means he has to go back on the waiting list for a new liver. What follows is a series of 277 miniatures about his time in hospital and in rehab, before and after the transplant. The narrator, and with him David Wagner, has an autoimmune disease whereby his body rejects his liver. He has been on medication since the age of twelve but has lived a fairly normal life, having fun, travelling, fathering a child. And now, well, he's confronted with his own mortality.

Wagner's narrator shares his thoughts and emotions, veering from suicidal to joyous and including how he deals with the unknown donor, throughout the process. These are hard enough to deal with. What made matters worse for me was that the state he is in often seemed degrading. Helplessness, hopelessness, boredom, ridiculous hospital-imposed routines, pain. Raised testosterone levels mean he has a bit of a one-track mind, presumably awkward when you're bed-bound. Or maybe the guy always has a one-track mind, what do I know? At times I found myself teetering between pity and admiration for exposing himself so honestly. That wasn't something I wanted to feel about this book, specifically about its author.

And then I read this piece in the FAZ, in which Wagner talks about how it's not quite autobiographical, or not entirely, or not in a straight-forward way. He worked on the book for five years, using his notes from his time in hospital but always with the benefit of hindsight, and always selecting what he wanted to use and what he wanted to cut away. Whereas his narrator speaks to us in his personal present tense, out of the very moment he describes - with all the immediacy and strength of emotion that entails.

There are other factors that make the book not just readable without crying, but thoroughly enjoyable. There's the writing, as witty and insightful and compact as usual. Then there's the humour. The book pokes gentle fun at the hospital and the people in it, the liver patients with their entertaining life stories and the nurses with their routine friendliness. What delighted me most was probably the narrator's memories as he lies in bed, of his previous lovers especially. I'm a sucker for that shit. And there's the form. Between the miniatures - does their length reflect the attention span of a sick man? - there are two special treats, a macabre prose-poetry list of bizarre deaths culled from newspaper reports and a collection of even shorter texts on the subject of tiredness. Are they personal aphorisms? I'm not sure what to call them but they include the following:

Tiredness is isolating; I'm tired all on my own.

Sex is tiring too. Post-coital falling asleep is easy, but not always desired.

So now to the niggle. It may well be a very personal issue or a personal reaction to the text. What I wanted from Leben was cynicism, intelligence, melancholy, a survival account, searing honesty, a radical rejection of pity. To some extent that was all there. But I also found another thing that made me feel uncomfortable, and that was the way the narrator rediscovers his will to live for the sake of his daughter. Being a parent, I realise we all think this way at times, making grand gestures and sacrifices, being strong and holding out for our children. Talking and writing about it, however, seems difficult without pathos coming into it. And while Leben is remarkably and delightfully low on pathos for the most part, where the narrator's daughter is concerned I felt it shining through more than I wanted. Which is something I didn't notice in Wagner's book about his daughter, Spricht das Kind (see my review).

Nonetheless, this is definitely my book of the season and I'll be truly upset if it doesn't win the Leipzig book prize. 

Speaking of pathos, you can order a nice plastic organ donor card here (in Germany) and you can sign up to the NHS's organ donor register here (in the UK). If you want to donate in the USA you can register by state here. It would be good if you did because I might one day need a new right eye. Thank you.

Leipzig Nominations

The nominations for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair - the literary award of the season - are out now. There are three categories: fiction (including short stories), non-fiction and translation. Sadly, I can't link directly to the lists so if you're interested, please just navigate there from the link above.

Here are the five fiction titles:

Ralph Dohrmann: Kronhardt
A very long debut novel about sixty years of West German history. It's got a lot of praise since it came out last August but seems to be one of those books sadly overlooked by prize juries. So far. Its editor was very excited about it last summer, or at least I assume this was the book she told me to keep my eyes out for. I'm pleased for her.

Lisa Kränzler: Nachhinein
Yay! Teenage girls! Young writer Kränzler won a prize in Klagenfurt with an extract from this unconventional novel about girls from different sides of the tracks. I found it "thoughtful and sensual and overtly political but (it) didn't rock my boat so much."

Birk Meinhardt: Brüder und Schwestern
Another sweeping panoramic historical debut novel, this time about East Germany. The writing looks fine, what with the author being an award-winning journalist.

David Wagner: Leben
My favourite, obviously. Wagner - with whom I was once going to go out for a walk but it was too cold - writes about a man waiting for an organ donation. I suspect it is masterful. It comes out tomorrow and I will be reading it.

Anna Weidenholzer: Der Winter tut den Fischen gut
Perhaps the most quirky title on this not un-quirky list, this seems to be a novel about oddballs getting through life as best they can in a small town. I'm guessing it's well observed and entertaining, and it's written by a young Austrian. 
 

Congratulations to all the nominees.

David Wagner: Welche Farbe hat Berlin

Berlin is doing its darnedest to make me look forward to a little sunshine. How many days of rain in a row? It's like living in Birmingham. I just admitted my embarrassing Coke Zero habit to a pharmacist to explain why I wanted caffeine tablets (in case I get caught short of my chosen poison in India), and he was delightfully rude in that flirtatious Berlin way. Apparently other people only take diarrhoea medication and disinfectants with them. Sheesh. He said he'd only manage about half of my daily dose, and I told him I'd been working long and hard on my Coke Zero habit and wasn't about to kick it right now. Just give me the drugs, man. It helped that the three men before me had been picking up methadone, I think.

So anyway, to make me feel homesick in advance, I've been reading David Wagner's Welche Farbe hat Berlin. It's a collection of short pieces about Berlin, written between 2001 and 2011. Sometimes they're linked into short stories about walking around from place to place. Sometimes they're collections of observations about things like street furniture. One of my favourites is a series about a night out clubbing with a friend, which ends with a bouncer telling them to go home and get some sleep. Or a bike ride around the neat forests and lakes in the West. The places are ugly, dirty, badly designed, there's a deadly dull all-day Schiller reading, there is rubbish on the streets - and it's all so wonderful.

The pieces are calm and clever and full of knowledge and anecdotes about the city's history, architecture, bars, people. It's hard to classify them - perhaps they're miniature essays, perhaps flaneurism, although Wagner isn't detached from what's going on around him and there are references back to himself and others. Probably it doesn't matter what they are, because they're beautifully written. At times sober, at times playful like the title piece on the colour of Berlin, with plenty of dry humour. I've been finding them delightful; they've been making me sigh. This morning I parcelled up the book and sent it to a friend, but I shall want it back very soon, OK, Amanda? I think I shall buy a job lot and give a copy to every friend who leaves Berlin, to make them regret it.

I've been growing tired, you see, of Americans writing about Berlin, which as another friend pointed out is really just Americans writing about Americans in Berlin. With a certain exception, that's not something I care to read about any more. Especially when the writers claim to be giving us profound truths about a place where they don't speak the language. In this respect, I'm a typical immigrant: anyone who came later than I did is a sham and has no idea about anything. You've never lived with a Berliner? You don't have a German child? Well keep your mouth shut. On the other hand, I don't see much point in writing about place in a generalising way anyway, as surely we all experience it differently?

And that's not what Wagner does here. He's not a born-here Berliner but he's been here a long time and he knows his stuff. And he makes no attempt to tell us what Berlin is like. All he does is show us snapshots of the way he's experienced it. Popping out to get bread on Kastanienallee, he notices the tourists and the mothers but they don't prompt a generalisation. There are changes over the years, which he remarks upon, but he doesn't attempt to establish a pattern or make a point. Just good, pared-down writing about a place he seems to love. I wish you all could read it.

David Wagner: Spricht das Kind

I sort of know David Wagner and sort of don’t. Certainly he’s one of those people I see at all sorts of literary events – he seems to go out a lot but then he’d probably say the same about me. Anyway, I sort of don’t know him well enough for him not to recognise me when we were both walking down the street with our respective daughters the other week. Now, I was very pleased to see that David Wagner has a very tall daughter, because most people I see at literary events don’t seem to have children, or they only have very small children because they only got around to having them slightly later in life than myself. And I sometimes think there’s an invisible dividing line between people with children and people without children, although people with children can be intensely irritating.

Anyway, shortly after the above non-incident I was in a bookshop looking for something else entirely and came across Wagner’s book Spricht das Kind. So I bought it because it’s obviously about the tall daughter, and I was curious. I’d read and admired some of his writing about Berlin, but that’s somehow much more abstract. How would a great stylist like Wagner approach the subject of his own child?

The answer is: beautifully, thoughtfully, intelligently, discreetly, originally. I’m struggling to think of other men who have written about children. Children do exist in German novels but they often seem to be props in the focus on the parents’ relationships. The most recent exception, I suppose, was Thomas Hettche’s Die Liebe der Väter, which I didn’t read because it was received in a very politicised way and came across as an angry reckoning with the child’s mother and the system. Oh, and Wolf Wondratschek’s Das Geschenk about a father and his teenage son, which I did read some of but soon tired of.

What men do write about, of course, is their own relationships to their fathers. And Wagner covers that ground here too. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Spricht das Kind is billed as a novel but is actually a collection of miniatures, something the author has excelled in elsewhere. At just over 150 pages, it’s an afternoon’s read or something to dip into. The chapters, if I can call them that, vary from one paragraph to five or six pages, covering a period from 2002 to 2008 (the book was first published in 2009). The child of the title is never named but we know it’s a girl, and the sections don’t seem to be in strict chronological order. Wagner simply describes moments with his daughter, many of which prompt him to remember moments in his own childhood and reflect on his own mother and father. For instance, a game played with his daughter reminds our shaggy-dog-storyteller of how he played as a child, how he was not allowed to hang from his father’s neck at some point and how from then on his father seemed much smaller. And then the child lifts him up – a neat and melancholy full circle, ending with a childish act I presume all parents will recognise.

What’s so remarkable about the book is this: There are a number of ways in which parents tell stories about their children – out-and-out boasting, putting down other children and parents, anecdotes about embarrassing moments that are actually intended to make you think their children are wonderfully shrewd and honest. And Wagner knows that – hell, who hasn’t heard thousands of these stories? – and while the book’s not totally devoid of all those things, he’s always aware of what he’s telling us and what it tells us about his narrator or himself, and he thus miraculously avoids the "isn't she cute" trap. What we get instead is really quite deep reflection, suffused with really quite deep love.

Regular readers will know that love is an important and much-abused word for me. This book showed me a parent’s love that I recognised. The wonderment at the child’s world, the projection, the search for similarities to oneself, the laughter, the consolation. A child as an anchor and an inspiration, a mirror that often enough throws back an image not as positive as we’d like.

Wagner’s thoughts are punctuated by things the child says, as the title suggests, enjoying her wordplay and her ideas about the world. At times other voices come in too, friends telling stories about their own children or parents. It feels almost like a lazy afternoon on a blanket in the park, the children playing out of earshot while the parents talk, except they go into the kind of emotional depth you only reach quite late at night. There’s a languid narrative curve of sorts, surging in the middle as we learn more about the narrator’s parents and his relationship to them, falling again as the child helps him deal with life. Page 146 made me cry for quite a long time. But there’s no conclusion, because how can you put an end point on childhood?

Spricht das Kind is a beautiful book about being a child, a parent and a parent’s child. The back-cover blurb on the paperback pitches it slightly too low, presumably aiming for impulse buyers looking for a light, amusing read. While it has its light, amusing moments and is life-affirming on the whole, it’s much more than that. The publishers say Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood is never far away, but I can't say I noticed that. What I did notice was the sophisticated language on a level that might seem incompatible with the subject-matter, but never actually did. Ditch the parenting manuals and read it.