Emerging German Writers at Words without Borders

They asked me to guest-edit an issue of Words without Borders showcasing emerging German writers. I nearly burst, I was so proud and excited. For years I'd been fantasizing about putting together an equivalent to Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, only with Germans. The power! The influence! The delights of including certain favourites and excluding writers who've blanked me at parties!

And then: Jesus, it was hard. Try choosing only ten writers, of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. As in, only ten writers you want the whole world to read. Also, try choosing ten pieces of writing that are varied and reflect different aspects of a "national literature" (let's not go there) and are also serious and fun to read and outstandingly good and grab you by the throat and shake you and work on their own and in combination. Thankfully, they let me choose only German writing rather than German-language writing from Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Luxemburg, and wherever. So only about half the total volume to sieve through.

I define the nebulous "emerging" as not yet world famous and with a maximum of two book-length publications. Some of the writers haven't put any books out yet. For poets I was looking for people who haven't yet been translated. I define "German writers" as people who write in German in Germany, possibly coming from elsewhere, or come from Germany and write in German elsewhere. There's a fair amount of moving around the world among the authors in the issue – I didn't check anyone's passports.

One thing very quickly went out the window: an age limit. Because an age limit is a ridiculous restriction that punishes writers who've been doing other things with their lives before getting published and rewards writers who take the straight path. Another thing was that I sought help and advice on poetry, because I know very little indeed about poetry.

Anyway, look upon their works ye mighty, and despair. Maybe no one will remember them in ten years' time or maybe they'll be famous the world over. These are my emerging German writers:

Finn-Ole Heinrich
Olga Grjasnowa
Stephanie Bart
Marianna Salzmann
Bettina Suleiman
Simone Kornappel
Isabelle Lehn
Francis Nenik
Noemi Schneider
Deniz Utlu

Thanks to my fellow translators Amanda DeMarco, Jake Schneider and Julie Winter, and to the lovely editors at Words without Borders. The issue also features a special on writers from Burundi, which you should also read. Also I wrote an introduction. Enjoy. I am available for interviews.

Frankfurted

I'm all Frankfurted out. It was lovely. Except when it was horrible and I'd had enough of seething masses of bodies and glossy displays and superficial conversation. But even then I ran into the perfect grumpy person with whom to indulge in a great moaning session.

I do love book fairs, and yes, I know I've told you that before. I love strolling around and meeting people and saying hello and getting chatting and exchanging compliments and swapping tips. Because it's the social aspect that counts most for me. I'm tempted to just write a long list of all the lovely people I met and all the lovely people I missed, but that might not be very interesting for anyone else. So here's what I did instead.

I hung out a little with Naveen Kishore and Sunandini Banerjee from Seagull Books, who publish many of my translations. Which is always a delight but suddenly got much more popular once they announced Mo Yan's Nobel win on Thursday lunchtime - because they have two of his books on their list. Lots of people kept popping by to congratulate them, total strangers included, who I suspect were pleased that a small (but perfectly formed) press based in Calcutta will benefit from the Nobel-imbued glory. Also I looked after their booth very briefly while they had an appointment elsewhere, which was the most fun ever. Did you ever go to furniture stores as a kid and play house? This was like that, only with real coffee. Would you like a catalogue, sir? They'll be right back in ten minutes, ma'am, do take a seat. Like being a housewife, I wouldn't want to do it all the time but short bursts are fine.

There were some other prizewinners too: Finn-Ole Heinrich won the German Children's Book Prize and Anna Kim won the European Union Prize for Literature. I'm terribly pleased for both of them. You can read one of Finn's short stories in my translation at Words Without Borders and you'll soon(ish) be able to read Anna's The Anatomy of a Night from Frisch & Co. The German Book Prize winner Ursula Krechel was very present in general at the fair but I don't feel quite ready to comment on her book yet.

I also moderated an expert panel about the German book trade and translation funding. It was called a "morning briefing" because it started at 8.15 a.m. Actually it went fine, there were actually a number of people in the audience and none of them actually fell asleep. Amazingly, they also asked lots of questions. We'll probably do it again next year but I suggested a later time-slot - although it was a surreal experience to walk through the halls of an empty book fair.

What it meant, however, was that I had to go to bed early on Thursday night, in order to be sufficiently gorgeous on Friday morning to calm my nerves. Which was a good thing, as somebody took my photo afterwards ("That looks great. I'll just take another one though."). But it was not helped by someone inviting me to a surprise reading on Thursday ("It'll be great. And then we'll go to the XY party, and then we'll go to the YX party, and then..."). I didn't go. A friend of mine has a wonderful motto for times like these: Willst du gelten, mach dich selten. It doesn't work when the fomo gets this acute though. And it doesn't help when the trade press publishes full-colour spreads of publishing people partying. Every day of the fair. But hey, I never get invited to those parties anyway and I'm not terribly good at gatecrashing.

So I had to make up for it on Friday night. My divine hosts treated me to home-cooked dinner and made me break the golden rule: First eye make-up, then schnapps. Doh! Nobody commented though. And then it was off to the Hotlist indie book award ceremony and party. After various rather out-there events in previous years (difficult locations, wacky moderators), this time was lower key and just plain better. The lovely Axel von Ernst and Thomas Böhm did the honours in a totally un-hysterical manner and the prize went to the excellent Droschl Literaturverlag of Vienna for Tor Ulven's Dunkelheit am Ende des Tunnels. It's a translation from the Norwegian, and I'd have forgiven the excited publisher for not thanking the translator in person if it hadn't just proved very difficult to find his name on their website. It's Bernhard Strobel, and I found it on Amazon in the end. The prize money goes straight to the publishers for their hard work, and I do understand the logic of that, but still. Congratulations, Bernhard Strobel. They couldn't have done it without you.

There followed a party. There were drinks (some of them cold), there was dancing, there was much standing around chatting and drinking, there was an apology to someone for un-friending them on Facebook but they hadn't even noticed - bizarrely, because I post way too much on Facebook - there was a whispered poem about fat, there was a numismatic exchange and an explanation of fomo to the main culprit, there were compliments from the kind of people who count (i.e. women with impeccable taste), there was a failed attempt to recruit a new DJ partner, there were sleepless Cubans, there were more drinks, there were embarrassing spillages from my purse, there was a fantastic staircase at the Literaturhaus that was unfortunately too crowded with bodies to recreate any Hollywood movies, there was totally tactless discussion of facial hair fashions, there was an apology to someone for having written he looked like a bum - he doesn't, he looks like an angel - there were some more drinks and not enough dancing, there were uncalled-for confessional moments.

Then it seemed like a good idea to go to the Hoff. Everybody talks about it at the fair, all the Americans are like, "You gotta go to the Hoff!" and I'm like, "Well..." Really it's the Frankfurter Hof incredibly posh hotel, where I was overwhelmed by the prices and the carpets but underwhelmed by the bathrooms and the people-watching. Nobody was lying across Alice Schwarzer's lap, in fact Alice Schwarzer wasn't even there, and nor was Arnold Schwarzenegger. There was a man with a bad wig coming on to a very young blonde woman and another man who was rude about Acton. I left before finding out what unspeakable thing my companion did there last year.

Life will seem so dull now.

Diversity

I almost forgot! The latest issue of Words Without Borders features two rather different German writers: Finn-Ole Heinrich and Herta Müller, translated by myself and Philip Boehm. Enjoy!

Finn-Ole Heinrich: Gestern war auch schon ein Tag

Printing an endorsement by Clemens Meyer on the back of a book is a little like waving a piece of cake in front of my nose. There’s no way I’m not going to take the bait. In this case it was unnecessary – I’d taken the book home before I even noticed it. Because I already know that Finn-Ole Heinrich is a bright star in the making, the secret hero of German indie publishing.

Gestern war auch schon ein Tag is his third book, in the wake of the short story collection die taschen voll wasser and the superb coming-of-age novel Räuberhände. The novel impressed me so much I did the closest I’m ever going to get to a Victor Kiam and translated part of it.

The new book contains eight stories, all told in the first person. All the narrators, though, are thoroughly different. A dustman, a bad kid, a builder, a student, a young girl about to finish school. And all their stories are moving and credible, told by simple enough means but so effective that they genuinely suck you in.

The longest, called simply “Marta”, is also the most experimental, but not overly so. Heinrich is an excellent reader, and I’ve seen him perform part of this story with pre-recorded asides in which the narrator addresses Marta, in parentheses in the printed version. A student just about to finish his dissertation finds a young woman passed out on a train and takes her home. As it turns out though, it’s Marta who makes him her pet, and he has a chance to put his theoretical studies about care work into practice. Because Marta is slowly killing herself, living a life of hedonism, forever dreaming of going back to nature. It’s a touching love story, told with no holds barred – what does it feel like to have sex with a physical wreck, and why would you abandon your own life for someone else?

“Wessi” on the other hand, a shorter piece, is closer to Clemens Meyer’s writing in terms of subject matter. We have an East German road construction worker living in a caravan by the motorway during the week, looking forward to weekends with his girlfriend. And a West German workmate who trains up animals for dogfights on the side. Ossi meets the true Wessi one night, going from contempt for an annoying colleague to admiration for his hard-hitting business practices, then repulsed by the brutal aspects of his job on the side.

Heinrich is one of very few German-language writers who create characters outside the educated middle-class demographic. My theory is that German society is so segregated that your average writer doesn’t come across the working class after leaving primary school (if at all), and thus has no idea of its existence, rather as he or she has no idea of the lives of migrants beyond the most roughly hewn clichés. Finn-Ole Heinrich, on the other hand, spent several months travelling around Germany, writing down the stories of the people he came across. You can read some of them at www.heimathuckepack.de. And he seems to understand how different people tick. He never patronises his characters; the football hooligan is just as complex as the young father faced with having to care for his disabled brother.

At some point Finn-Ole Heinrich also worked with people with disabilities, and what shines through in this collection is how closely he’s looked at people’s reactions to illness and disability. There are some who feel obliged to care, and some who simply feel fear, repulsion and shame. But where he hits a nerve is when these two aspects collide, fantastically in the first story, “Zeit der Witze”. Heinrich worms out emotions that scratch at the surface of his characters, making them all the more believable.

If I were in the business of giving patronising advice to young writers, I’d be tempted to ask Finn-Ole Heinrich to be slightly more daring in how he tells some of his stories. Because while you can tell he has some great human material up there in his head, I do miss the narrative extravagances that someone like Clemens Meyer gives us. I think another difference is that while Meyer often focuses on more active characters – the actual drug abusers and prostitutes and dog-owners – Heinrich’s narrators are almost all looking on from the outside, one step removed. The beta males to Meyer’s alphas, so to speak.

Perhaps there’s something to be said for this viewpoint; perhaps I’m simply rejecting it because the act of reading is already a step away from what purportedly happens on the page, and I want my vicarious experiences as undiluted as possible. This is good honest story-telling, often brutally honest. And that's enough.

Anthology Anthology (I)

I’ve mentioned the really rather good Das Magazin here before. It’s generally very active in promoting writers and literature, and this month the literary editor, Wiebke Poromba, has a wee rant. It’s not against a particularly difficult target though – she complains that young German-language writers don’t have much to say for themselves. Schluss mit dem ganzen Larifari, she proclaims – perhaps deliberately (mis-)quoting Berlin’s hot pop sensation, Peter Fox – enough of the folderol! All these clean-cut young men going straight from school to writing careers, so polite and sober and unexcited. Her two examples are Daniel Kehlmann and Benjamin Lebert, who she says were pressed into literary contracts at such an impressionable age that they didn’t have time to experience life proper before they started churning out novels. Her suggestion is vodka rations for young writers – and reading more women.

Aside from the cliché-ridden argumentation, I only agree with Poromba to a certain extent. I’ve just finished a mammoth young-writer-athon and I found plenty to get me excited, although there were also authors I too found rather soporific. In our recent interview, Claudius Nießen mentioned the anthology Turboprop – Beste Stories, which he edited along with Christoph Graeber last year. And this year I brought another anthology back with me from Leipzig, Zeit der Witze – Texte junger Autoren. And because they both feature young(ish) German-language writers, it made sense to me to review them together.

Starting with what I find the better of the two, just to rob you of any sense of tension, Turboprop. It’s a collection of stories by the editors’ favourite guests from the reading series of the same name.

And it kicks in with a piece by one of my favourites, Clemens Meyer. Never one to shy away from “real life” issues, Meyer has turned to prostitution. This is a slightly rambling monologue by a not-quite-so-young prostitute about her punters, how she got into it, and her secret dreams. I learnt a lot, so it may well be meticulously researched. I think he’s written better – but you can’t accuse him of wanting to please any mothers-in-law with this story. And the next piece too stands out a mile – Anke Stelling, a youngish woman writing about Claudia, who has two young kids with Heiner the rebel, thought she was doing everything differently – and hates her life. With an ironically distanced narrator who tells us, “Oh, you know what, just to make it simpler, I’LL be Claudia.” And gives us the classic line: “Heiner wanted to be cheated on, there was no other explanation for his absences, so Claudia went to bed with the midwife.” I think I may have shouted for joy when I read that.

Then we get Tobias Hülswitt regaling tales of drug-taking in the Middle East, which I did find slightly yawnsome but which you can hardly claim is clean-cut. Annette Mingels has a solid relationship story, followed by an absolutely awesome piece by Guy Helminger mingling friendship, dream and gritty realism. Paul Brodowsky I personally find slightly difficult, and here he experiments to the point of becoming just plain uninteresting, with little to say but unusual ways of putting it.

Selim Özdogan, another of my personal faves, has contributed what he does very well – a short short story about friends, which captures the essence of being a young man (poor things) with his characteristic melancholy. Philip Meinhold does the same, also very well, against a backdrop that seems suspiciously like 90s Friedrichshain. In between them, Jochen Schmidt, a consummate comedian, made me laugh with a childhood story I think I’ve heard him read live, which had us rolling in the aisles. And Sasa Stanisic closes the anthology with a false-bottomed box of a political story, as reflective as his novel How the Solider Repairs the Gramophone but firmly set in Germany. Excellent stuff.

Zeit der Witze is a little more patchy, I have to admit. Book-ended by two big names – Uwe Tellkamp and Clemens Meyer – are sixteen young authors, mainly from the Leipzig creative writing programme. And I’d have to say that some of them confirm Poromba’s prejudices against young writers’ “gepflegte Langeweile” – cultivated boredom. But some of them are surprisingly good – or at least surprising.

One of the exiting things about creative writing programmes, I guess, is that students have a sounding board for experiments. A few of the short stories in this compilation read rather like attempts to try something new at all cost, playing with perspectives, narratives and characters. In a sense, it’s worth having the book on the shelf in the same way as buying art by young talents may mean you later own something by a recognised genius. Or it may not.

I enjoyed Johanna Hemkentokrax’s confusing tale of suburban antifascism, Christopher Kloeble’s extreme slow-motion twenty seconds of mathematics, Sebastian Brock’s thoroughly dislikeable hero, Katharina Schwanbeck’s painful coming-of-age story, and Marie T. Martin’s dystopian vision.

Tellingly though, what stood out for me in Zeit der Witze was the slightly more established authors. Clemens Meyer, again with a prostitute’s monologue, adds the grit that the others do rather lack. Uwe Tellkamp adds wry humour and experience with an account of his first book and how it came about. And Finn-Ole Heinrich adds searing honesty, with a narrator explaining his guilt at no longer fancying his girlfriend after an emergency amputation, in a very strong story that rightly gives the book its title.

Read one after the other like this, Turboprop clearly trumps Zeit der Witze. But it’s an unfair competition, with experienced authors pitted up against newcomers. Given a few years, I suspect some of the younger writers just coming out of creative writing programmes will be producing outstanding work – provided they do manage to gather the odd experience or two outside of academia. For those in Berlin, you can catch a couple of representatives of the Leipzig programme at the Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus on 24 April.

The Boy with the Robber's Hands

I finished it a couple of days ago - Finn-Ole Heinrich's Räuberhände. It's the story of two boys - one has the perfect parents to the point of cliché, the other has an alcoholic mother who drinks outside the supermarket. They're best friends from the age of about 13 or so, and Samuel practically moves in with Janik and his parents. The narrator is Janik, just after the two have finished school and head off to Turkey in an illusory attempt to find Samuel's Turkish father - whose name he doesn't know. But before they left, Janik had overstepped a line and their friendship is now on the brink of collapse.

So the story takes place on all sorts of time levels. The most obvious is the tiny snippets of future at the beginning of each chapter - so you read with a permanent sense of slight foreboding, not knowing quite what's going to happen. But you're also regaled with tales from happier times - psychological tricks played on the perfect parents, a Kleingarten paradise, young love, how the two boys became friends. And then there's Istanbul, where the two of them chase Samuel's unknown father at a whirlwind pace - all heat, dust, sweat and resentment at fever pitch. And the structure works incredibly well, keeping up the pace so you're always on your toes but never irritated.

The critics have praised the film-like descriptions - which is a bit obvious really,seeing as the author is studying film - or at least he is when he's not writer-in-residence in lovely Erfurt. But it's true - they seem to glide by your mind's eye in technicolour. What I like most about the book, though, is the characters. Apart from the clichéd parents, they are all wonderfully painted: first and foremost Samuel and Janik, but also Samuel's mother Irene, Janik's girlfriend Lina, and another local alkie, Bubu. And the simmering resentment between the two boys is ever-present but rarely boils over - Janik resents Samuel for being the apple of his parents' eye, and Samuel resents Janik for having everything he wants.

The book also looks at national identities, although not overtly. Samuel has never met his father, but believes he is Turkish - and reinvents himself as a Turk. He learns Turkish from cheap cassettes, starts singing and dancing and yearns for his one true love - who has to be a Turkish girl, of course. As the narrator points out, Samuel has no idea what Turks are really like, it's all just a desperate romatic projection. On the other hand, Janik and his parents are such typical middle-class Germans it almost hurts. Wellmeaning teachers, wholemeal vegetarian lasagne, barbecues in the garden. The two (imagined) cultures meet in the middle at the boys' Kleingarten - a concept, I believe, alien to other nationalities. They create their cliché of Turkey there, in the most German of settings, alongside a grubby canal.

It's a book that makes you feel for the people who inhabit it, that makes you care what happens to them. It's a book you want to read again once you've finished the last page. I hope it'll do really well. Here's a brief sample from the very beginning:

(All his stuff and everything of hers worth saving is packed in boxes and stored in our garage. My parents helped me. Nine boxes, fourteen rubbish sacks. It took nearly three hours.)

My parents love Samuel. And he loves them. When Samuel gets on my nerves I sometimes call him their adopted child - that's his sore point, so to speak. Samuel and I have been friends as long as we've been in the same class. Nearly seven years now. And since then, Samuel's slept at our house almost every night. He's had his own bed in my room for ages. It was a present from my parents. They asked me first of course, if it was OK for me. They'd never make a decision like that over my head. But it's not as if I'd have minded. I'm not jealous, Samuel's my best friend and if my parents hadn't asked me, I probably would have asked them.