Jeffrey Lewis: Berlin Cantata

I was provoked into attending the Berlin launch of Berlin Cantata by the way the novel was billed as a polyphonic work centering on a house just outside Berlin, and some of the people whose hands it passed through during the twentieth century. My, my, I thought, that sounds terribly familiar, doesn’t it? Has someone rewritten Jenny Erpenbeck’s excellent Visitation?

No, as it turns out. Jeffrey Lewis’s novel in fact centres around Holly Anholt, who comes to Berlin in 1991 to claim back her Jewish parents’ former property. Only she runs into a whole host of characters who make things more complicated for her and the reader. The thirteen voices make for a slippery experience, and the fact that it’s written by an American makes it very different to Erpenbeck’s work.

After nibbles and drinks (served by a friendly rabbi, bizarrely) at the launch, Lewis told us he’d come to Berlin himself in 1991 to research the novel and only written it much later. One scene – a party for the Day of Atonement – is based on his own experience of Jewish life returning to East Berlin in those days, when Russian Jews had begun moving to the city and the tiny East Berlin community was being bolstered by others who had rediscovered their Jewish identity for various reasons.

Berlin Cantata is strong where it deals with Americans. Holly and her mother (who dies before the action proper begins) have great voices, with Holly’s conflicting feelings about her parents’ former house and her new German boyfriend convincingly related. They’re both three-dimensional characters with interesting stories to tell.

However, from the moment Lewis tries to slip into German roles, the novel becomes less and less convincing. Many of the characters came across as caricatures so wooden they made me laugh – the guilt-ridden leftist boyfriend who asks Holly to let her anger out on him in bed, the former East German dissident now out for revenge on those who informed on her and a new cause on which to hang her flag, the Jewish journalist turned entrepreneur who seems to have been inserted for mere comic relief, with a poorly researched farce about training up skinheads to repair Western cars. One German character I did appreciate, though, was Franz Rosen, who has built up a fake legend for himself of how he survived the Nazis while aiding the resistance and now hopes for exposure and a kind of redemption.

Rosen, in his complexity and with his avid sexuality, reminded me of a character in one of Maxim Biller’s 1994 short stories, “Lurie damals und heute”. Lurie has survived the war and the pogroms and the ghetto and the marauding Poles in Lithuania in the only way he could, by looking out for himself and only himself, and is now a successful old man in Munich. But he wants no part in the German remembrance culture, something Rosen embraces under false – or at least exaggerated – pretences.

Lewis’s greatest injustice to his German characters, however, is reserved for those he plainly dislikes. There’s nothing wrong with disliking characters, particularly if they’re Nazi apologists or vindictive old women. But by giving a number of the German characters ridiculously stilted diction that makes reading their sections even more unpleasant, he makes them look idiotic. Their supposedly “German English” upset my suspension of disbelief – the novel’s vague premise is that all the characters are writing down their own passages, so I was suddenly forced to consider why on earth they would be doing so in English, and in fact whether an East German caretaker would speak any English at all in 1991 (highly unlikely). And while there’s little need to take their ideas seriously, I wish I could have read their statements with less irritation.

So what does Lewis do well enough to keep me reading all the way to the end? He tells a meandering story, jumping to and fro in time, while resisting the temptation to tie up all the loose ends. He ventriloquises delightfully, all his voices sounding genuinely different. And he attempts to address the complicated issue of ownership of place. Once Holly moves into the country house she meets the neighbours, a rather tight-lipped bunch who struggle to deal with her arrival. Yes, her parents once owned the house and only survived the war by hiding out in a bunker in the forest. But haven’t they got to live somewhere too, they ask themselves. Don’t they have memories of their own of the place that outweigh Holly’s merely celluloid remembrance? Holly seems to be affected by their confusion, and her search for her roots becomes more complex as her understanding of the issues broadens.

While I know few practising Jews in Berlin – let’s face it, there aren’t very many of them – I have heard dozens of stories about the Jews who are gone. Many of the stories are tied to buildings. The house I live in now belongs to a West German, who actually bought the claim from the descendants of its former Jewish owners in the USA once the Wall came down. I’ll soon be moving to a house from which over 100 Jews were deported to concentration camps. There is Otto Weidt’s Workshop for the Blind, now a museum where Jews worked and hid for as long as possible. There are the Stolpersteine, brass cobblestones commemorating Jews who were deported and killed, embedded in the pavements outside their former homes. And the launch of Berlin Cantata was held in a former Jewish girls’ school, now an expensive art space and restaurant.

So Jeffrey Lewis has picked up on a great idea to explore Jewish life returning to Berlin. As I’ve mentioned above, he does so very convincingly from the American perspective, showing us the now outsiders who were once part of the city. Sadly, I found that wasn’t enough for me as an insider in Berlin. For a better insider’s perspective on houses changing hands, read Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation (trans. Susan Bernofsky) and for a better insider’s perspective on Jewish life in 90s Germany read Maxim Biller’s Land der Väter und Verräter. And don’t forget that things have changed a great deal here over the past twenty years. The latest outsiders are party people and jobseekers from the crashed margins of Europe, and Berlin is once again struggling to come to terms with them. My favourite quote from the novel in fact goes some way towards consoling me to the Jewish journalist character: “My rough reaction to all the Jews arriving from Russia was, get out of here, this is my turf. Go home, go to Israel, go to New York, what’s wrong with you?”

A Titular Conundrum

So the news is Mr. Tim Mohr has finished his translation of the follow-up to Charlotte Roche's Wetlands and the English version will be out in spring of 2013. Hooray - a braver man than me. But this time the title's much trickier. Schoßgebete is a play on words (like Feuchtgebiete meaning, umm, moist areas and wetlands), and also echoes the previous title. The literal translation is something like lap or maybe crotch prayers but it's a pun on the word Stoßgebet, which – I kid you not – means a short prayer sent up to heaven, also referred to as an ejaculation.

Any bright ideas? You can read my disappointed, damning review here for inspiration. My best idea so far is Fifty Shades of Brown. Ha! Add your suggestions in the comments section.

On Bad Reviews

Perlentaucher just alerted my attention to a piece in trade mag Buchreport drawing on an item in Harvard Business Manager, which seems to go back to a study by the Stanford Graduate School of Business released last year. They say that positive book reviews (in the New York Times) are good for sales but negative reviews are only bad for established writers' sales and in fact raise the profile of lesser-known authors, resulting in increased book sales:

For well-known books, negative publicity resulted in less likelihood of purchase, whether participants reported their preferences right away or after a delay. However, for unknown books, the negative publicity did not affect the likelihood of purchase after a delay.
"This suggests that whereas the negative impression fades over time, increased awareness may remain, which can actually boost the chances that a product will be purchased."

Hooray! That makes me feel much better. My problem was that I'd originally started this blog as a vehicle for my unbridled enthusiasm for German books. And what with it being about loving German books, I didn't much feel like slating titles. Also, not being much of a masochist, if I don't enjoy a book I usually stop reading it, so a sensible review is generally out of the question. Plus, like most people, I do want to be liked and my usual method is to be nice in general and hope people don't think I'm a total bitch. That kind of precludes being nasty about people's books - especially because I live in Berlin and do actually come across people whose books I read in the most unexpected situations.

But over time, I have actually totted up a few negative reviews here on love german books. Sometimes a novel is flavour of the month and I think people would like to know more about it, sometimes books win prizes or are particularly pertinent to my blog, sometimes I think books are almost good and deserve a bit of attention but the review comes out nastier than I'd planned. And sometimes I'm just feeling bitchy and some book has aroused my ire.

And I'd been feeling very, very bad about that for two reasons: firstly, there have been occasional indications getting back to me on the grapevine that publishers have taken my word and not bothered considering a book for translation based on a negative review here. OK, publishers rarely consider books for translation in the first place, so it's not like I bombed Hiroshima or anything. But, you know, I still feel like I killed someone's puppy. And secondly, it happens totally often that I meet writers at parties who I've written something negative about (and often forgotten all about it), and they either say to me, "Oh, you write that blog where you said my book was insipid and boring and I read really badly at an event," or they don't say anything and I spend the entire conversation worrying about what I might have written about their book. That's where a smartphone would come in handy, I guess, combined with an app to put authors' faces to books I've been rude about.

So now I have a new empirical weapon in my charm arsenal: increased sales. Because obviously love german books is totally the equivalent to the New York Times, right?
I'm raising your profiles here, writers I don't like! Be grateful.

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.

Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize to Burton Pike

This year's $10,000 award from the Goethe Institut USA for an outstanding translation goes to Burton Pike for Gerhard Meier's Isle of the Dead, (Dalkey Archive Press, 2011). Pike is a revered Germanist who has also translated Musil and Goethe. Susan Bernofsky has much more information at Translationista. Congratulations!

Bachmann Prize Announces Contestants and Cuts

This year's participants in the Austrian literary talent show by the name of the Bachmann Prize have been announced! Fourteen emerging Swiss, Austrian and German writers will battle it out in a trial by critical jury over three days this July. The prize is very prestigious and has often been a launching pad for literary talent, provided the poor writers don't collapse under the pressure.

The bad news, however, is that the "Bachmann-Preis goes Europe" translation programme has been cancelled for this year due to a lack of funding. I'm particularly upset about this because I was one of the translators who worked on the project in the previous two years. It was an invigorating experience and a great way to identify exciting writers, some of whom I'd ignored in the past and some of whom I'd simply never heard of. According to the organizers ORF, around thirty translated books came directly out of the project - including my translation of Dorothee Elmiger's Invitation to the Bold of Heart.

So you can put it down to sour grapes but I still feel this is an unfortunate decision that plunges the Bachmann Prize right back into provinciality. Making the competing texts available in seven European languages was both a sign of openness to other cultures and a genuine benefit to the writers themselves, who thus had an instant calling-card for the international stage. I know a number of them were invited to Britain, Ireland and the United States on the strength of that calling-card, and I'm sure many also travelled elsewhere too.

I wrote a live blog on the Bachmann Prize in the previous two years but I won't be doing so this year. Partly simply because I'm moving house around that time and will have enough on my plate, but also because I felt I had genuine insights to offer through my intimate knowledge of the texts and I wanted to share those thoughts. It was always very exhausting but rewarding, and I know that people actually followed it - even in Klagenfurt where the competition takes place.

I know you'll all write to your MEPs and stage a sit-in at Klagenfurt to fight for the reintroduction of the translation programme. And rest assured that if it is reinstated, I shall reinstate the love german books live blog.

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:

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.