Jan Peter Bremer: Der amerikanische Investor

Peter Handke wrote a book in 1987, which I read with some puzzlement at university: Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers. I think it must have been my introduction to the notion of the German book in which nothing whatsoever happens. As far as I recall, a writer goes on a walk and thinks about some things, including writing. Then he goes home again. It may be a tad pompous.

Jan Peter Bremer's book Der amerikanische Investor also describes a writer's afternoon, and there's also a walk involved, albeit a rather short and chaotic one with a disobedient dog. Again, most of the action takes place in the writer's head, but this time he hasn't achieved his day's creative quota in the manner of Handke's exemplary writer - he can't actually manage to put any words down on paper.

Because Bremer, not content with bearing a striking resemblance to aged British comedian Ken Dodd, has written a fine piece of anti-Handke here. Instead of considering aesthetics and other literary matters (or at least until towards the end of the book), his anti-heroic writer is occupied with worries about his home and family. Their apartment building in Berlin has been bought up by the American investor of the title. Who has started renovating it, causing subsidence in the writer's flat. So he decides that instead of agonising over that opening sentence he wanted to write for his book today, he'll write a letter to the American investor. But how to start...?

As the day goes on we make the acquaintance of the writer's dog, his wife, his son and daughter, and various neighbours including the building's previous janitor and an up-and-coming young writer with a thirst for beer. All in a kind of slip-sliding third-person monologue that doubles back on itself so often you might get dizzy. Because although he's suffering from severe writer's block, this guy has no lack of imagination. So there's the moment of panic in which he imagines his daughter's been run over by a car but his capable son sorts out the coffin so as not to bother him, or the idea of his hard-working wife getting an aid job in Africa and the family moving to a mud-hut where he'll tell the local children stories and mop their feverish brows. Or the many scenes in which the American investor is jetting around the world in his private plane, talking down to his manservant and passing judgement on the writer. In fact, for a German book in which nothing whatsoever happens, a hell of a lot happens in this book.

What's most marvellous about it is Bremer's self-deprecating humour. His writer could be a photofit of himself - lives in Kreuzberg, wife and two kids, rather silly children's book about a dog - but is utterly self-absorbed and unreflective. All his wonderful excuses for not getting anything done, all his fantastically clichéd ideas about the people around him - the nearly 100-year-old lady next door, little Ali in his son's class, and above all the American investor - show him in such a bad light that I spent much of my time laughing out loud and folding down pages. And with only about 150 of them (pages, that is), there isn't time for it to get tedious. In fact with all the emotional ups and downs the poor writer goes through in the course of his day, it's pretty much the opposite.

I don't have a great deal more to say, except that you really ought to read this short novel if you enjoy humourous writing. Being a German book, it does of course have a serious and timely point to make, about property speculators and the Berlin housing market. But it does so with such a lack of pomp that Jan Peter Bremer pretty much walked away with the Alfred Döblin Prize for it (see my report here). I'm impressed.

Swiss Book Prices: to Fix or Not to Fix

So. Like Germany and Italy, Switzerland used to have fixed book prices and then scrapped them. Then it reinstated them at the beginning of this year. And now there's a referendum to get rid of them again. Those in favour of fixed book prices say their purpose is to protect books as a cultural asset. Those against, including the Swiss Pirate Party, say literature is not under threat and does not need protecting.

Let's take a look at one country with which I'm familiar that doesn't have fixed book prices - the UK. Looters have been avoiding Waterstones like the plague, but over the last couple of decades the bookstore chain has become pretty much the last place on the high street you can buy literature. Why? Because they do cheap deals, for which they charge publishers zillions of pounds. Which means everyone ends up reading the same stuff in a scary literary world run by people with MBAs. And that independent bookstores go bust and small publishers have less of a chance on the market. And then in an oh-so-ironic way, the supermarkets have got in on the bookselling game and begun undercutting the chain bookstores in terms of both price and taste. Glittery pink books about flying ponies "written" by glamour models, anyone? Waterstones' latest reaction? Reintroduce centralised buying. Yay. Even less choice and variety.

Not being an economist, I have no idea whether it's a bizarre contradiction that a lack of state regulation (since Britain abolished fixed book prices) has not led to greater competition and greater choice for the consumer but to a near-monopoly. Maybe it's just me who finds that odd.

So now let's take a look at Germany, a land of evil state intervention. While the largest chain, Thalia, is present on most high streets, there are still plenty of independent bookstores on the ground. It's hard to find statistics but this 2007 NY Times piece on the subject quotes a figure of 2600. Independent publishers are, if not exactly flourishing, then at least holding their ground. And Katie Price's books have not been translated.

Now, books are not an expensive commodity in Germany. It's not in publishers' interests to set their prices too high, and there's still a subjective pain-barrier at around €20 for a hardback. Because they don't have to discount their bestsellers, publishers can keep prices for smaller print-runs low. But the best argument against the anti-fixed-pricers is libraries. If you can't afford to buy new books, buy them used or borrow them for free.

This is a bit of a rant, I admit, what with the lack of facts to back it up. So I won't attempt to suggest that the high quality and wide variety of German-language writing is due to fixed book prices. But on the other hand, nor can I see any evidence to uphold the argument behind the Swiss referendum - that fixed prices ultimately harm books.

So This Is What Editors Do

I was going to write something about fixed book prices in Switzerland, which would have been a little polemical and bordering on a rant. But it's Friday afternoon and I'm translating a publisher's catalogue texts, which always makes my brain go limp.

So look! here! in German Vogue! A warm, fuzzy fluff piece about a German editor, Friederike Schilbach, who is indeed very nice. Apparently, she tends to "sit in the M. Wells diner in Long Island City with a mint lemonade or in Café Gitane on Mott Street with a cup of earl grey," wearing "a Rachel Comey blouse, an À Detacher dress or apricot-coloured summer jeans."

I would appear to be in the wrong profession. No doubt you're feeling that way too right now, dear reader, unless of course you happen to be a literary editor. In which case, enjoy your aniseed and coriander loaf, wherever you may be.

An Answer of Sorts to Tim Parks

In April of this year, Tim Parks wrote a piece for the Times Literary Supplement on the paradoxes of ‘international literature’, sparking a great deal of interest in the literary world. A writer, translator and teacher of translation, Parks would seem the ideal figure to explain the phenomenon of global writing. And yet in this and three shorter pieces for the New York Review of Books blog, he persists in claiming a flattening of literature and language caused by authors writing with translation in mind – based almost entirely on conjecture.

Much of what Parks tells us in his TLS article is true. From his perspective as a translator, he has a special insight into the workings of international publishing. He is right to criticize what he calls an ‘industrialized translation process’ in which English-language books are split between several translators working under time pressure, in order to hasten publication in other territories. The findings of his study at ILUM University in Milan, showing that the space given to American writers in Italian newspapers is disproportionate to that for other nationalities, might well be reflected in Germany and elsewhere. Yes, translation into English is often regarded as a badge of quality, as he points out, and it is something many writers seem to yearn for. And his anecdotes from editors in the Netherlands and Italy on what books they manage to sell abroad are telling – titles for translation do indeed often have to conform to particular national and political expectations. Hence the proliferation of German novels featuring Nazis in English translation, incidentally.

There are certainly plenty of examples of translators being overlooked, yet Parks begins his series of exaggerations here. Translators are becoming less rather than more visible, he writes – without offering us any basis for comparison. In fact, as translators have become more professional, so we have been raising our profile. Nobody goes into translation for the fame, but it is becoming standard practice in the USA to print the translator’s name on the book cover and in Germany to credit them in promotional material, with some publishers including translator biographies below the author’s own blurb.
Parks states that translators only receive awards for translating major authors. A glance at the recipients of the Helene and Kurt Wolff Prize for translation from German to English proves how wrong he is – or are Gert Jonke, Michael Maar, Moses Rosenkranz suddenly household names? Not that their translators Jean M. Snook, Ross Benjamin and David Dollenmayer are any more famous, but still.
It is in his criticism of the Nobel Prize that Parks enters the realm of the ridiculous, however. Readers, he tells us, are not interested in hearing about translators, so they ‘must be reduced to an industrial process’ and disappear in the reaction to such prizes. May I recall Herta Müller’s Nobel Prize not too long ago, when one of the first of those to comment in the British press was her former translator Martin Chalmers? We can hardly expect the Nobel committee to honour all of a writer’s translators (Müller has been translated into English alone by at least six people), or even in fact to single out their Swedish translator for praise, for instance, despite presumably reading their works in translation, as Parks points out. Yet translators and academics – in the English-speaking world often one and the same individual – are often the first port of call for journalists unfamiliar with writers of the ‘Herta Who?’ ilk. Despite being notorious whingers, we translators should acknowledge what we have achieved. The picture is not quite as black as Parks paints it, and we do ourselves no favours by denying that any progress has been made.

The next of Parks’ contentious theories is the idea of a rivalry between nations to establish literary prestige, with governments promoting national literatures as ‘expressing the genius of a people’. In the case of Germany, that would be the Goethe-Institut, which does indeed do an excellent job of getting German literature into English and many other languages. Yet it is hardly the bastion of cultural imperialism as which Parks presents it and its equivalents. Certainly, it is open about promoting translations as an aspect of cultural policy, which the German Foreign Office defines in this context as ‘presenting Germany as a country with an internationally renowned and diverse cultural scene’.
But its employees are hardly badmouthing other literary cultures or kicking the people from the Institut Français under the dinner table. Nor do they live and breathe Herder’s romantic nationalism, as Parks seems to be suggesting. In fact the various national cultural institutes often work together on promoting international literature in New York, London or Prague, running European Literature Nights and European Book Clubs. Yes, there are editors who’ll say, ‘Oh, but we already have one translated book in our catalogue this season.’ But no, the nations are not in any real sense vying for literary recognition. Individual books, of course, are – regardless of their country of origin.

It is when it comes to what he defines as the paradoxical aspect of the ‘international space’ of literature that Parks takes off into pure conjecture. Writers, he claims, are seeking to escape this imagined national literary culture by writing outside of its narrow boundaries and expectations. This we can accept; also, today’s writers are as strongly influenced by David Foster Wallace, Kathy Acker and Valérie Valère – to take the rather obvious example of Helene Hegemann – as by their national forbears, at least in countries with lively cultures of literary translation. What Parks adds is that authors are now aware of ‘the harvest of celebrity to be reaped in terms of international recognition by doing so.’ This is the scandal of the entire piece – the author is accusing his peers of abandoning any realistic details of their own countries and any linguistic ingenuity in favour of a bland global form of writing, for the sake of world fame. He refers to this kind of writing – that does not employ linguistic deviance or cultural specifics – as a ‘strategy’ and a ‘recipe’, as if it were deliberate rather than a matter of influences, taste or fashion.

While Parks doesn’t name names in his TLS piece, his blogs for the NYRB go further. In the first on this topic, entitled ‘The Dull New Global Novel’ and dating from February 2010, he quotes several examples: the British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, to whom we shall return in a moment; ‘Scandinavian writers I know’ who ‘avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader’; and bizarrely, Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk. Here, if I understand rightly, he is claiming that the writers maintain their political positions as a similar form of strategy for literary success: ‘So the overstated fantasy devices of a Rushdie or a Pamuk always go hand in hand with a certain liberal position since, as Borges once remarked, most people have so little aesthetic sense they rely on other criteria to judge the works they read.’
In the next of his NYRB pieces (‘Franzen’s Ugly Americans Abroad’, May 2011), Parks has the unusual idea of comparing two individual writers to buoy up his theory. And who does he take? Jonathan Franzen and Peter Stamm. In contrast to Franzen’s long lists of Americana, he tells us that Stamm ‘never tells you anything about Switzerland, or the other countries where his books are set,’ allegedly making his work easier to translate. His conclusion: ‘We might say that if the Swiss Stamm, to attract an international public, has been obliged to write about everyman for everyone everywhere, Franzen, thanks to the size of America’s internal market, but also to the huge pull the country exercises on the world’s imagination, can write about Americans for Americans (which is no doubt as it should be) and nevertheless expect to be read worldwide.’
A month later, in ‘Your English Is Showing’, Parks admits it may not have been a good idea to back up his theory with reference to only two writers, and goes on to claim with a little more caution that Peter Stamm, Siegfried Lenz and ‘many other French and Italian authors’ appear to him to have ‘a skeleton lingua franca beneath the flesh of these vernaculars, (…) basically an English skeleton’. He is researching the matter; we await his findings with bated breath.

But back to the idea of homogenized writing with translation in mind. This theory has been doing the rounds of academia since about the mid-1990s, and Parks cites one of the very few examples ever given: Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro has in fact made statements on the subject in the past. Following the release of Never Let Me Go in Britain in February 2005, he told Tim Adams of The Observer that he’d always written with a sense of translation in mind, initially because his narrators were Japanese but speaking English. But now: ‘I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write – with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.’
Three months later, he talked to Michael Scott Moore and Michael Sontheimer for Der Spiegel about what it means to be an international writer. Ishiguro: ‘Well, one important aspect is that if I spend time here in Germany or somewhere else explaining why I've written certain passages, when I go home and try to write my next book, somewhere in the back of my mind I have this idea that I'm going to be translated. Something that looks great in English may not work in other languages because it relies too much on puns, brand names, cultural references. And I feel a pressure to remove these things from my writing. This can be very dangerous.’ (My italics)

So we have a single writer who has spoken about being affected by this phenomenon. Ishiguro is aware of the issue and realizes it presents a risk to the quality of his writing. When it comes to Stamm, on the other hand – another much-translated writer – Parks may well be confusing cause and effect. Could it be that Stamm has been so widely translated, with his debut novel Agnes available in twenty languages, because his style is so sparse and his subjects so universal? Could it be that he is not obliged to write in the way he does but chooses to do so for reasons of personal taste? Rather than Stamm being a cold, calculating egomaniac chasing the international literary limelight by avoiding mentioning too many details of Switzerland in his work. We can’t know – but then again, neither can Parks. One thing at least is for sure: we’re not dealing with a chicken/egg scenario here. Agnes came first, the translations followed.

By implication, what Parks is looking for is a restoration of distinct national literary cultures; his ‘genius of a people’. The Chinese should write like the Chinese, for the Chinese, and about the Chinese. A vain hope no doubt, and rather a patronising one at that. As writers gain access to more and more literature in translation, so they take on new influences and adjust their writing, consciously or unconsciously.

Happily, there are plenty of counterexamples to Parks’ theory of the dull global novel in German-language fiction. While we’re on the subject of the Nobel Prize, let’s take a brief look at Herta Müller, known for her difficult language riddled with neologisms and her very specific focus on German-speakers in Romania. Certainly this blatant contravention of Parks’ ‘recipe’ for international success has done her little harm; she was another widely translated (if not widely read) author even before 2009. I’m currently enjoying the conundrums of translating Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s Apostoloff – a novel about Bulgaria, for God’s sake, that revels in its use of original language. For just as some publishers are happy to commission translations that are less culturally specific and linguistically challenging, there are others – and many translators – who relish the challenge of more ‘difficult’ texts.

Let us hope, then, that German writers do not swallow Tim Parks’ recipe for international success and turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. That for every young man imitating Raymond Carver there is a Thomas Lehr, a Steffen Popp, a Peter Wawerzinek, a Dietmar Dath, and for every piece of pared-down Prenzlauer Berg realism there is an Emine Sevgi Özdamar, a Maja Haderlap, a Kathrin Röggla and an Elfriede Jelinek waiting in the wings. With around thirty German-language novels translated into English a year on average, it hardly seems worth the effort to write Parks’ mythical dull global prose in the hope of international fame.

Review Release Dates

I've done a very bad thing. I reviewed a book before I was supposed to, broken a temporal embargo if you like. When you get sent German books before they come out, they have a date in the front with a little note: please do not review before such and such a date. Now obviously I instantly forget this date, as I instantly forget all dates that aren't my daughter's birthday. And I just review books as and when I remember to do so.

In this case I saw Simon Urban's Plan D in a shop window and was reminded of its existence. I also saw a review of it in a magazine but instantly forgot the release date printed beneath it. Seeing as it was obviously on sale, I thought I might as well post my review. Oops!

I've now accidentally torpedoed an entire marketing strategy, according to which, ideally, hundreds of reviews will appear in the same short period, suggesting to readers that this is THE big book of the season. Obviously my thousands of readers will also be frustrated, having been so enthused by my review that they rushed out to their local bookshops, only to be told that Plan D isn't actually on sale yet (unless of course they went to my local bookshop, which seems to be being rather naughty too). My sincerest apologies. I shall attempt to maintain the impression of magical review simultaneity in future. If you rushed out to your local bookshop, I do hope you simply placed an advance order. Because your really ought to read the book. Once it's come out.

Simon Urban: Plan D

A book I truly adore is just out now: Simon Urban’s Plan D. It’s a remarkable genre-busting detective novel set in Berlin in October 2011. There’s one slight difference though – the GDR still exists.

Martin Wegener is a detective with the Köpenick branch of the People’s Police, called in to investigate the death of a mystery man found hanging from a gas pipeline in the forest. All the initial clues point to the Stasi, which is still in operation although less powerful than before the ‘Revitalisation’ in the early 1990s. With important economic consultations between the new West German chancellor Oskar Lafontaine and the East German party chairman Egon Krenz coming up, a West German police officer is called in to assist after the news is leaked to Spiegel magazine.

The two men start their investigations, more hindered than helped by the Stasi, uncovering a terrorist opposition organisation and a separate conspiracy to introduce a ‘third way’ in the GDR – the Plan D of the title (D standing for Deutschland, right?). Bombs go off, spirits are drunk, sausages eaten, there are shady trips to secret prisons and conspiratorial meetings in an abandoned fairground.

Meanwhile, Wegener yearns after his ex-girlfriend, now embarking on a career in East Berlin’s key energy export and transit industry ministry, and has imaginary conversations with his former boss, a stubborn non-conformist who disappeared without a trace a few years ago. The plot twists and turns beautifully, with more deaths occurring and plenty of tensions arising between the East and West German detectives. Wegener is betrayed on both the professional and the personal level and the novel ends with a personal defeat for him. We do find out who the mysterious victim is and who killed him, but the whys and wherefores are much more important.

The detective novel – amazingly done in the manner of a modern-day Raymond Chandler – would stand alone just fine, but Simon Urban has combined it with an ingeniously imagined modern-day East Germany. He obviously had great fun coming up with ideas about what might have been – from brand names for electronic devices more advanced than those in the West to oil-powered cars and blockbuster movies titles. And there are laugh-out-loud moments in which we come across genuine people in unusual situations – for instance a senile Margot Honecker singing along to Wolf Biermann records or the politician Sarah Wagenknecht as an action-movie heroine.

In one brilliantly written scene, Wegener stumbles around the labyrinthine underground ‘Molotov’ bar, looking for his workmates but growing increasingly confused and emotional. The place is a den of iniquity that serves rhubarb organic lemonade – the flavour that’s always sold out at the shops – with a shot of vodka, and scallops and chestnut puree and bacon and chutney and the best brand of East German sparkling wine, Rotkäppchen Superb, and offers darkrooms and boudoirs and bathtubs and willing waitresses, all in the name of a corrupt socialism on its last legs. As he wanders the dingy corridors catching sight of opulent scenes, he remembers the last time he was there – and the Russian waitress Magdalena with whom he was caught in flagrante in his cramped Wartburg car afterwards. The entire remembered episode is told in incredibly sexy, breathless long sentences, only for Wegener to wake up from his melancholy reverie and spot his West German colleague apparently flirting with Magdalena. Of course he instantly imagines the two of them stretched out in the other detective’s roomy Mercedes, but can’t find his way into the room they are in and ends up spewed out of the bar and onto the hard pavement.

The whole novel is beautifully written in impeccable and imaginative language. The protagonist Wegener is an impressively painted character, an aging cynic on the surface who is actually powered by love and idealism. But what makes the book so very special is the exuberantly portrayed vision of East Berlin under a collapsing socialist system – pockets of luxury for visitors and functionaries, surrounded by grime and decay and decorated with laughable political slogans. Urban raises questions about German history and about the integrity of our political systems, combining them with a real page-turner of a plot.

The only tricky thing about Plan D is the humour of spotting modern-day celebrities in odd what-might-have-been situations. Obviously it would be difficult to recapture those moments of recognition in translation – perhaps a glossary might be the solution? But actually, Urban doesn’t assume that his readers know a lot about the GDR itself so the book is very accessible.
I eavesdropped on conversations about the novel as long ago as last summer – this is the kind of book people get excited about, and rightly so. Unsurprisingly, it's nominated for the Hotlist indie book prize, which you too can vote on until 15 August. Urban’s mentor is Juli Zeh, already a success with her literary crime fiction in English translation (see my review of Dark Matter/In Free Fall). And I was lucky enough to translate a sample for the publishers Schöffling Verlag, an absolute pleasure. Publishers: please give me a chance to really get my teeth into the novel after that first tempting taste – you know you want to…

Note: this is an adapted version of a report for New Books in German.

Interesting Links

Three interesting links after two weeks away: first of all to a piece by Emily St. John Mandel at The Millions all about Irmgard Keun. I'm a huge fan of Keun's 1932 hit novel The Artificial Silk Girl, now re-released in English translation, not just as a historical document but as a piece of writing. It contains one of my favourite passages about Berlin, in which the young woman narrator describes what she sees on the streets of Berlin to a blind man in a breathless documentary style. Mandel also tells us about her later novel After Midnight, and you can read my review of Child of All Nations here. So glad this fascinating and talented writer is being rediscovered.

Then there are the fascinating results of a Goethe Institut survey on how the rest of Europe sees Germany. The British statistics are here; explore the site for other countries. Best book in German? Faust.

And thirdly, an interesting attempt at linking places and prose: the project Streetview Literatur. Various German writers have contributed short stories about people going places in four cities (Berlin, Leipzig, Munich and Nuremberg), whose journeys you can follow on Google Maps, get the app or ebook (which don't yet exist), or whatever. Unfortunately I found the site a little lacking: there's no list of the authors involved and the quality of the pieces varies, let's say. Creator Marion Schwer has accompanied the project with a blog, again interesting reading - particularly the piece on whether and how to actually pay the writers for their contributions (under Teilnahme). That's always going to be a problem with exciting no-budget projects like these, I suppose.