All the Lights Playlist Part 2: Guest Post by Jamie Lee Searle

Following on from yesterday’s Part 1 of the playlist, I jumped at the chance when Katy asked if I’d like to write a guest post and choose the next five tracks. I was lucky enough to edit her translations of Clemens Meyer’s All the Lights, and fell for many of the stories in the process. Here are my picks:

Story Six: I’m Still Here – a journeyman boxer from Rotterdam on the road in Germany, who gets knocked down time and time again, but keeps on trying to make money to support his wife and future child. The song: Simon and Garfunkel’s The Boxer, not just because of the title, but the lyrics: ‘In the company of strangers/In the quiet of the railway station running scared.’ And, because he gives into temptation on occasion too: ‘I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome/I took some comfort there.’

Story Seven: All the Lights – A man meets up with an old flame. Perhaps my favourite in the collection; the simple but powerful prose highlights everything they don’t say to each other. The song: Neil Young’s Heart of Gold. Because, for me, it fits the mood – that wistful awareness of what you could have had, but moving on all the same…

Story Eight: The Short Happy Life of Johannes Vettermann – a disturbing tale of a man holed up in an opulent hotel suite with drugs and hookers and memories. The song: Jimi Hendrix’ Purple Haze. Because the tense, hallucinogenic atmosphere of the song matches how I felt when I was reading and editing it.

Story Nine: A Trip to the River – a guy gets let out of prison and goes to visit his cellmate’s daughter to pass on some money to her, only to find she’s working as a hooker. The song: Johnny Cash’s San Quentin. ‘And I walk out a wiser, weaker man’. Because both the story and the song tell of difficult lives, bad things happen and repeat through the generations – but there’s an element of gritty determination to keep going too. And also because I love Johnny Cash and was determined to fit him in somewhere.

Story Ten: In the Aisles - about a shelf-stacker who spends his nights working in the aisles of a cash'n'carry and forms a tentative bond with two co-workers, an old man and a young, fragile married woman. The song: Barbara Jones' I Can't Help it, Darling. Katy actually suggested this one and I agreed as soon as I listened to it - because it has a bitter-sweet feeling that reminds me of the prose.


Thanks, Katy, for letting me join in!

Jamie Lee Searle is a German to English translator and blogs at http://translatingbetweenthelines.wordpress.com
Many thanks from me too, for the editing and the playlist. Come back tomorrow for more musical fun, pop-pickers!

All the Lights Playlist Part 1

Earlier this year I translated Clemens Meyer’s short story collection All the Lights, which you can get in good bookshops all over the UK right now, brought to you by the publishers And Other Stories. There are fifteen stories in All the Lights, and I just thought it might be fun to think up a playlist of one song to go with each story. Sort of like a translator’s soundtrack to the collection. It may not make a lot of sense to anyone else, but here it is (part 1):

Story One: Little Death – a man’s on the dole and missing his ex-girlfriend, losing his grip on life in general. The song: Richmond Fontaine’s Let Me Dream of the High Country – because of the first lines, “It’s time for him to get up, but he won’t / until he’s late." And because I met singer Willy Vlautin through Clemens. Although he’s not actually singing on this version:

Story Two: Waiting for South America – a man receives a series of postcards from a friend who says he’s come into money and gone travelling. The song: Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz, The Girl from Ipanema – because the story’s not really about Latin America, more about what we imagine it to be (among other things).

Story Three: The Shotgun, The Streetlamp and Mary Monroe – a man’s trying to go cold turkey and his girlfriend’s in bed. The song: Elvis Presley’s Love Me Tender – because the first time I really met Clemens he sang this song (he was practicing for an upcoming karaoke session) and because this is a story about love and needing other people.

Story Four: Fatty Loves – a teacher doesn’t quite give into temptation, but he can’t control his physical appetite. The song: Boomtown Rats, I Don’t Like Mondays – because school can be hell for all concerned.

Story Five: Of Dogs and Horses – a man bets all he has at the races to save his dog’s life. The song: The Pioneers’ Long Shot Kick De Bucket – because it’s a song about how a horse can spoil your day.



More over the next couple of days...

Translators Recommend...

Ah, translators! Where would you be without us? You'd be stuck on a gloomy little island reading books about tea and biscuits with the vicar*, that's where. In the interests of world peace and eternal literary harmony, Donal McLaughlin, Tess Lewis and myself (three venerable translators) have recommended some books for German Literature Month for Lizzy and her literary life. And Lizzy, being all-round lovely and more appreciative than most, kindly writes: "If, like me, you tend to read German literature only in English translation, it’s only fair and right to thank the wonderful translators, who make it possible."

I'm feeling all warm inside now.


*Insert cliché about your country and its national literature here.

Erpenbeck, Kehlmann, Schlink Longlisted

The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is the largest and most international prize of its kind. Libraries from all round the world nominate books written in any language (but available in English) to form a whopping great longlist. The nominees for 2012 are all books first published in English during 2010. And this year's longlist includes three German books: Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation, trans. Susan Bernofsky,  Daniel Kehlmann's Fame, trans. Carol Brown Janeway, and Bernhard Schlink's The Weekend, trans. Shaun Whiteside.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that one or other of them makes it onto April's shortlist of ten. Certainly the lovely Visitation has been shortlisted for all sorts of things - wouldn't it be nice if it won something?

Open Mike 2011

The Open Mike is probably - no, not probably, absolutely - the most important competition for young writers in German. It takes place across an entire weekend in November in Berlin, and has launched many a career. The idea is to take 22 writers under the age of 36, I believe, whittled down from over 700 entries this year, and get them to read for 15 minutes each, under the misleading title of "Open Mike". It's presumably the English title that encourages these young writers to sprinkle their texts with English phrases - or I'm just over 36 and don't understand the youth of today. Anyway, and then three writers choose their favourites and they get a bunch of flowers and are whisked away, Miss World-style, on a whistlestop tour of appearances in other cities.

There's also the taz-Audience Prize, where mere mortals choose their favourites and they just get a bunch of flowers and a nice taz mug and their story in the paper but not all the Miss World treatment. Regular readers may remember that I myself was one of the mere mortals allowed to choose the audience prize last year. This year, unfortunately, I couldn't actually attend the main competition - but I did go to the pre-event reading by past winners and also managed to catch the awards ceremony.

I'd been looking forward to the reading on Friday night because I was interested to find out what had become of our audience winner from last year, Sebastian Polmans. In fact I do know what's become of him; he's just published his first novel with Suhrkamp. I also know he had the contract in his pocket before we gave him the prize, but my vain ego wanted to hear grateful words from Polman's own lips for my personal part in building his legend. It was not to be - Polmans was sick and couldn't attend the event. Instead, we had Ondřej Cikán, who isn't a past winner in the strictest sense, not having actually won, but who did read some great cowboy poems in 2009. Alongside Konstantin Ames, who did win with his poems in 2009, and Rabea Edel, who won with prose in 2004.

German critics have been arguing recently about whether the autobiographically influenced first-person narrative has passed its zenith. Certainly, Friday evening was evidence of German writers who couldn't be much further away from that first-person model. Ames was not my cup of tea. I shall give him the benefit of the doubt and assume it was nerves that made him react so rudely to the moderator. And also that he is capable of thinking beyond national clichés à la: the British are better at irony. Whatever the case, however, he stated that poetry is not there to be understood, and his poems were indeed magnificently impenetrable. We learned nothing whatsoever about Konstantin Ames from his poems, except perhaps that he speaks English and French and reads Jandl.

The pattern continued with Cikán, who read from a glorious novel by the name of Menandros und Thaïs. It's set in ancient Greece! Sort of! With gruesome battles and abductions! And cups of tea! I was truly impressed and enjoyed the reading enormously, partly because it was such fun to see a writer go ahead and write about ancient Greek warriors and their soap-opera adventures. Ah! And then came Rabea Edel, who for me is the epitome of beautiful artifice. I mean that in a good way, Rabea. I know her vaguely, and like her, and yet I know absolutely nothing whatsoever about her because she seems to be a very private person. She read from her second novel Ein dunkler Moment, which again couldn't be more distinct from me, me, me literature. It's based very loosely around the Amanda Knox case, and I found it extremely chilling and extremely well-written, with a plot that is extremely unlikely and so all the more fascinating. There are writers, then, who prefer to keep themselves to themselves when it comes to their literature, despite the benefits or the ease of marketing oneself even through one's writing - I was going to call it banking in on the autobiographical, but that sounds too judgemental. Because of course it's a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and it's really the critics who need to stop discovering imaginary trends every ten minutes.

So then today I arrived at the venue just in time to catch precisely 30 seconds of the very last reading. This, I decided while talking to everyone else who'd just sat through two days solid of readings, was a great strategy. I bought the anthology to read later and appeared astoundingly witty and cheerful in comparison to the rest of the audience. It helped that my friend and I had a portion-sized bottle of fizzy wine each, which we drank through straws like the supermodels do, apparently. Just for that Miss World feeling. The drawback was that I couldn't enjoy the usual bitching sessions about the pretentious/talentless/bad-haired writers, but a few stock phrases got me by well enough: I can never concentrate on poetry, I hate it when they put English words into all their texts, They're just not adventurous enough these days, Why all the adjectives? and the classic: Didn't like her outfit much.

Eventually the juries had made their decisions and the press conference had been held, and we all took our seats for the ceremony. But what was this? Last year when I was on the audience jury - did I mention that already? - we had to go on stage and introduce ourselves personally in front of hundreds of people. And I died a million deaths and looked really shite. I know that because I saw a photo of myself later, so even if you were there and you saw me there's no point denying it. This year there was none of that, just a very brief list of the names and a wee speech from one of the jury members, none of whom looked shite. They chose Christina Böhm for her story "Platzanweisung", which was a bitter reflection on the culture industry from its margins, dripping with black humour. It also featured Kleist and Wyatt Earp. I wonder if Böhm would appreciate that it reminded me of Helene Hegemann? My quibble would be the ending: And then I woke up.

The jury jury (Felicitas Hoppe, Tilman Rammstedt and Kathrin Schmidt) also chose Christina Böhm, along with Joseph Felix Ernst for "Dora Diamant", which I found great fun, a fragmentary text about Dora and Kafka in the last few months of his life, and featuring a chess match rendered entirely in algebraic notation and a scientific lecture about moths and also several mentions of Kleist. I rather wish I'd seen Ernst reading it, although my favourite of Kafka's ladyfriends is of course Milena Jesenská. The designated poetry prize went to Sebastian Unger, who I'm assured is very good. Certainly his poems appear to be highly intertextual and semantically inventive.

Next year I'm sure I'll enjoy myself all the more for not having attended this time around.

Annett Gröschner: Walpurgistag

So there I was complaining that German writers tend to leave the exotic and what they endearingly term the “underclass” to exotic and “underclass” writers – more on that on another occasion – when along comes Annett Gröschner’s Walpurgistag. I discovered Gröschner through my colleague and now friend Lyn Marven, who included one of her short stories in the outstanding anthology Berlin Tales. Her 2000 debut novel Moskauer Eis (which I haven’t read) is also in critic Richard Kämmerlings’ top ten of contemporary German-language novels. Two rather persuasive referees, I must say.

But Walpurgistag doesn’t need them. The novel’s a firecracker, a sparkly, loud, wonderful advertisement for itself. Set on one day in 2003, the book follows a ragbag (almost literally) of characters around Berlin as they go about their business, either banal or bizarre but mostly the latter. We open with Alex, a tramp who lives on Alexanderplatz but may have some kind of shady Stasi past. And as Alex closes the novel as well and is one of two characters narrating in the first person, he shall be our hero of sorts, and he does indeed intervene in the other characters’ lives in various ways that I shan’t tell you about. Suffice to say he’s a magnificent character who has made me look at homeless people rather differently.

Then there’s Annja, who is storing her father in a large freezer and needs Alex’s help to move house. Yes, you read that right, it’s that quirky kind of book, but the dad doesn’t seem to be 100% dead. Or young Paul, who pacifies his alcoholic artist mother with stolen schnapps after a day of fare-dodging on high-speed trains. There’s Gerda, who moves into a retirement home on Kollwitzplatz after a lifetime down the road in the Bötzowviertel and is swiftly integrated into a band of three daredevil drunken old ladies. Andreas drives a taxi and gets a blow round the head. Micha cuts off people’s gas when they haven’t paid the bill, Katrin delivers pizzas and is looking forward to a hot blind date, Heike’s unexpectedly pregnant, Helga’s lost her memory, Viola finds her son’s long-lost father, and Sugar, Cakes and Candy don’t quite succeed in combating sexism and racism, but not for want of trying. And there are more – all criss-crossing the city on foot, by car, by public transport and on a skateboard. That multiple motion keeps the pace skipping along throughout.

As the day proceeds, most of the characters gradually convene on the Mauerpark in Prenzlauer Berg. It’s not just any day, you see, it’s 30 April – Walpurgis Night. Germanists will know all about it from Goethe’s Faust, which features a wonderful witching scene that Thomas Mann plays on in his Magic Mountain. And Gröschner gives us three sets of three witches from three generations – virgins, whores and hags, as my charming university tutor would no doubt have put it. They all come together to leap over the witches’ fire in the park before the story folds in on itself most satisfactorily.

There are things I love about the book in a formal way – primarily the fact that it shows us a cross-section of Berlin’s population, or perhaps a cross-section of the people who don’t usually feature in bright, sparkly Berlin novels: first-generation Turkish immigrants and their children, single mothers, homeless people, policemen, circus artistes, funeral musicians, special needs teachers, dog-owners, people who mend broken coffee makers rather than throwing them away. And Gröschner’s strong, sensuous female characters make my jaded feminist heart skip a beat.

And then there are things that I love about the book in a purely personal way – the way objects occasionally tell stories, to wit that coffee machine or Gerda’s removal boxes. The way the knowing literary references (Döblin is never terribly far away) all seem to come with a tongue firmly in cheek. The way Gröschner uses obscure locations like graveyards and bars and the only job centre I’ve ever been to here, the one that used to be the Stasi headquarters, adding local colour but not for colour’s sake – they all have something to contribute to the plot. The way she tells us so many life stories from East and West Berlin and raises so many issues in only 440 pages. The way her characters all have unique voices, from old-fashioned Berlin dialect to Sugar, Cakes and Candy:

Sugar’s picking her nose. ‘Would you stop doing that? Eat crisps if you need more salt.’ (…) Sugar grins and moves on to the other nostril. ‘I’ll chop off your index finger,’ hisses Cakes. ‘No point, Sugar would squish her thumb up her nose.’ Candy’s the only one who laughs at her joke.

What all this suggests is that Walpurgistag is an example of a novel that just happens to be a bit right-on on the anti-racist and feminist fronts but is first and foremost really good literature. A joy for fans of a well-spun plot, for Berlin-lovers, for documentary filmmakers, for aficionados of magic realism, for historians, for taxi drivers, for people who can’t sit still, for you, and definitely for me.



For a taste, follow the link above to read a nice long sample in German.

Readings Online

The lovely people at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin have a lovely new project. As you may know, the Germans do like a good reading. Aside from being more plentiful, the readings in the German-speaking world are often much, much longer than anywhere else. Which calls for a great deal of patience and comfortable seating. But of course you can't always make it to every reading that might interest you, or you might be there but possibly sort of drift off and start admiring the architecture or playing that "who would I procreate with if the end of the world were nigh" game in your head and so rather miss out on some of the content.

Or maybe you don't happen to live in Berlin (shame on you!). Or your time machine is out of order. What you need is lesungen.net. 134 readings (so far) dating back to 1990. Featuring big names and award-winners, obscure poets, wordy moderators, bearded publishers, and all manner of people in between. How about this rather interesting one for a start: Günter Grass reading and talking to the now Büchner Prize recipient FC Delius back in 1992 about The Call of The Toad, among other things.

Oh, and if you only have a small amount of time, I find zehnseiten.de rather good for short, plain readings by German writers.

So put on your intellectual hat and relax with a nice German reading.