I went out drinking with the fantabulous German writer Felicitas Hoppe. Also, before you click the link and get a big shock, Going Dutch with German Writers has moved house to the Berliner Tagesspiegel newspaper. It's a very good newspaper, as you can tell by the fact that they are letting me write a monthly piece about going out drinking with German writers. In fact it's so good that there's a special page all about Going Dutch with German Writers in tomorrow's print edition.
Apart from the new address and snazzier surroundings, the series itself will stay the same. I will probably be more motivated to take photos though, because otherwise I'll get in trouble. I'm very pleased indeed.
Showing posts with label felicitas hoppe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label felicitas hoppe. Show all posts
Friday, 7 March 2014
Wednesday, 19 February 2014
Things My Friends and I Are Doing, Part I
Tuesday, 15 May 2012
Büchner Prize to Felicitas Hoppe
I'm rather jubilant that this year's Büchner Prize – Germany's premier award honouring established writers for their entire body of work – has gone to Felicitas Hoppe!
She's only the eighth woman to get it since 1951, following in the footsteps of Christa Wolf and Elfriede Jelinek, among others. Her playful writing has been translated into Dutch, French, Russian and Swedish, as trade mag Buchreport points out - but as yet not into English. I was recently bowled over by her thoroughly likeable reading from her utterly fictional autobiography at the LCB, and also enjoyed her Johanna, which is sort of about Joan of Arc but sort of not. Oh, and I shall now plunge right into her beautiful children's book Iwein Löwenritter to celebrate.
The Büchner Prize is a big grown-up pat on the back, the best German-language writers can get - I certainly hope this paves Felicitas Hoppe's way into English. The judges wrote:
She's only the eighth woman to get it since 1951, following in the footsteps of Christa Wolf and Elfriede Jelinek, among others. Her playful writing has been translated into Dutch, French, Russian and Swedish, as trade mag Buchreport points out - but as yet not into English. I was recently bowled over by her thoroughly likeable reading from her utterly fictional autobiography at the LCB, and also enjoyed her Johanna, which is sort of about Joan of Arc but sort of not. Oh, and I shall now plunge right into her beautiful children's book Iwein Löwenritter to celebrate.
The Büchner Prize is a big grown-up pat on the back, the best German-language writers can get - I certainly hope this paves Felicitas Hoppe's way into English. The judges wrote:
In her laconic and lyrical, headstrong and unconceited prose, she has invented a narrative universe in which basic issues of a 'postmodern' existence are acted out with liberated and liberating imagination.Isn't that lovely? Oh, and she gets 50,000 euros.
Wednesday, 21 March 2012
Hoppe!
I was at a very entertaining event last night - the German writer Felicitas Hoppe reading from her autobiography Hoppe. Hmmm, writers' autobiographies... perhaps not the most exciting genre in the literary world. "I got up, I had breakfast, I wrote, I had lunch, I did a bit of shopping, I wrote, I read a book, I went to bed." Alternatively, "I got up, I had breakfast, I couldn't write, I had lunch, I pulled my hair out in front of the computer..."
Alright, I'll stop now. I've already been accused of knowing nothing about writers' lives and I'll readily admit it. But you get the point, right? Despite the aura of intellectual glamour surrounding them at readings and events, despite all the "F*ck me Ray Bradbury" and "Hot chicks with glasses rapping about bookstores" videos, most writers probably don't have the kind of lives you'd want to read a whole book about. Unless they're Joseph Roth maybe. Thankfully, Felicitas Hoppe hasn't written a factual autobiography, she's written the autobiography she wishes she had. And to make sure we get it, she wrote it in the third person - hence the title, Hoppe, which is the name she gives to her heroine.
So she chose two places she barely knows, Canada and Australia, and refigured her origins as an only child with an absent-minded inventor as a father. Modelled on Uncle Quentin from the Famous Five novels – who's pretty much a blank canvas characterwise, what with being created by Enid Blyton. There's lashings of ice hockey and inventions but basically the book consists of a series of love stories, she told us, all stitched together by passages on board ships to the next exotic location. She read one extract set in Australia in which a teenage Hoppe meets a young man and lets him lead her around town only to find that he's blind and has no idea where they are either. Except that it was in the form of a story written by Hoppe - who is of course a German writer - with the narrator commenting scathingly on Hoppe's habit of lifting geographical details straight from the Baedeker.
All in all it was great fun. Very intelligent, very writerly with all those delightful twists and turns and references back and forth between reality and fantasy and fantasy fantasy like in the Hoppe character's writing. And very very funny. Just as an aside, Hoppe works so well as a comedic name - for me at least - because it sounds ever so slightly silly. I'm not sure whether that's the influence of English though. Whatever the case, you ought to read this book for the sheer joy of an invented life that's just that bit more out of the ordinary than most fictional lives. And now I'm going back in the jacuzzi with the Beastie Boys - guys, don't eat all the pizza before I get there!
Alright, I'll stop now. I've already been accused of knowing nothing about writers' lives and I'll readily admit it. But you get the point, right? Despite the aura of intellectual glamour surrounding them at readings and events, despite all the "F*ck me Ray Bradbury" and "Hot chicks with glasses rapping about bookstores" videos, most writers probably don't have the kind of lives you'd want to read a whole book about. Unless they're Joseph Roth maybe. Thankfully, Felicitas Hoppe hasn't written a factual autobiography, she's written the autobiography she wishes she had. And to make sure we get it, she wrote it in the third person - hence the title, Hoppe, which is the name she gives to her heroine.
So she chose two places she barely knows, Canada and Australia, and refigured her origins as an only child with an absent-minded inventor as a father. Modelled on Uncle Quentin from the Famous Five novels – who's pretty much a blank canvas characterwise, what with being created by Enid Blyton. There's lashings of ice hockey and inventions but basically the book consists of a series of love stories, she told us, all stitched together by passages on board ships to the next exotic location. She read one extract set in Australia in which a teenage Hoppe meets a young man and lets him lead her around town only to find that he's blind and has no idea where they are either. Except that it was in the form of a story written by Hoppe - who is of course a German writer - with the narrator commenting scathingly on Hoppe's habit of lifting geographical details straight from the Baedeker.
All in all it was great fun. Very intelligent, very writerly with all those delightful twists and turns and references back and forth between reality and fantasy and fantasy fantasy like in the Hoppe character's writing. And very very funny. Just as an aside, Hoppe works so well as a comedic name - for me at least - because it sounds ever so slightly silly. I'm not sure whether that's the influence of English though. Whatever the case, you ought to read this book for the sheer joy of an invented life that's just that bit more out of the ordinary than most fictional lives. And now I'm going back in the jacuzzi with the Beastie Boys - guys, don't eat all the pizza before I get there!
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