Blue Jewellery by Katharina Winkler

Blue Jewellery by Katharina Winkler

Austrian fiction

Original title – blauschmuck

Translator – Laura Wagner

Source – Personal copy

It is that time of year again when it is German Lit month and this is the first book I read this year it is. I choose one of the books from Seagull books. This one is by the  Austrian writer Katharina Winkler this was her debut novel and won a number of prizes when it came out and has been translated into a number of languages.I picked it as my first read as it is based on a true story but is also one of those stories that need to be repeated it is a universal subject of abuse no matter where it is the result is the same as in the book. She has since published another novel.

I have to cut the wedding cake, and after that they will lead me to the bedroom. I stare at the icing on the cake and the white rose made from marzipan, the music stops and finally Yunus is standing beside me, and Yunus’ mother, who is now my mother, places a knife in Yunus’ hand and my hand on top of Yunus’ hand, and together we cut ourselves towards my virgin. Dessert plates with cake and marzipan roses on them are drifting all across the room, hands that end in people are stuck to their underside. Men, women and children with laughing mouths, who take their parties as they come, and who don’t mind my virgin. A plate is pushed into my hands.

The start of Filiz Horrors begins not long after her wedding day

The book is based on the true story of a Kurdish woman and the inner life of her marriage. The two meet in their early teens Filiz is swayed by the beauty of Yunus. The pair marry against her family, but the sense is this can lead them to freedom from the small village in the Anatolia mountains and head to the west. The book sees the young Yunus see other women with what she calls Blue Jewellery is hidden away. The marriage soon takes a turn as FILIZ s sees the true nature of Yunus when he starts to abuse and attack he giving her her own Blue Jewellery this cycle continues as the pair dream of leaving but each time she is attacked she becomes more to his beatings and hiding the marks of it as they have children. Yunus becomes closed to the world of their home veiled and at the mercy of Yunus and her world shrinks around her.  They do eventually head to Austria via Istanbul with their young family Will fillip and her children Halil, Selin and Seda escape? what will happen? How far will the cycle of violence go?

When the girls from the Neighbourhood come and the giggles flow into the courtyard, I cannot remain a silent shadow. The giggles reach up  to my knee, and my heart beats.

I am a child , wife that I am

I join the giggles and hug the girls, and I laugh and show my open mouth.

Younus is beating me

He has to beat the child out of my bones

The girl put of my guts

He has to beat the wife into my bones

These lines so haunted me when I read them

What this captured so well is how often Abuse can be viewed as normal and how can a young girl’s life change so quickly at one point she said he beat the girl out of me and the wife into me struck me as so sad this is what she had as a marriage and accepted it. The start of the book almost made the abuse seem part of everyday life. I was reminded of some of the scenes in. Call the midwife this is a society caught out of time where the male role and role model have been skewed. The fact this is based on a real story is even more horrifying. As I said this is a universal story though it isn’t just a Kurdish story abuse happens everywhere and that is the important side of the story to highlight to make sure people know it’s wrong.The book has a sparse poetic nature to it. So if you like stories of village life a marriage doomed and a tough woman at the heart of it this should appeal to you as a reader if you like books like this.

Winston’s score – A – I wish I had read this last year a powerful insight into an abusive marriage

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Walking in Berlin by Franz Hessel

Walking in Berlin by Franz Hessel

German Non-fiction

Original title – Spazieren in Berlin

Translator – Amanda DeMarco

Source – personal copy

I managed to just squeeze the third read in for this week’s 1929 club and it was one I saw on the list of books when the year was announced earlier this year and was reminded about it I had seen it when it came out and had intended to look at it then but it had passed me by. So to get back to it Franz Hessel he was a friend of the great Walter Benjamin who has an essay at the start of the book about the book. He calls how Hessel a flaneur should look t the city afresh. The city of his birth with fresh eyes. Hessel himself with Benjamin had translated the works of Proust into German.

In the half-light of tinted lamps hanging in a number of smaller halls and rooms in the north as well as the west, same-sex couples circulate, here the girls and there the lads. Sometimes the girls are dressed, in a more or less pleasant manner, as men, and the lads as ladies. Over time their appetites, once a bold protest against the dominant moral laws, have become a rather harmless pleasure, and visitors who like to dance with the opposite sex are also allowed into these mellow orgies. They find a particularly favourable environment here. The men learn new nuances in tenderness from the female cavaliers, their partners learn from the masculine ladies, and your own “straight”-ness becomes a peculiar stroke of luck, as it makes you seem rather exotic. Oh, and the light fixtures are positively magnificent: wooden or metal lanterns with serrated frames, reminiscent of the fretwork of our boyhood.

I was reminded of cabaret her and imagine Isherwood sitting in his Berlin

I loved the idea of this book as I had just rewatched the two films Tilda Swinton had made more than 20 years apart, in fact, they could be seen as a cousin of these the first was just at the cusp of the wall falling and the second is the unified Berlin. She covers the same route on a bike across Berlin many points on her route  Hessel visited in his book. t Hessel had walked his Berlin in the late twenties what I first got from the book is that he had a way of looking but not jading the times one passage in the book really grabbed me about girls looking like boys and boys looking like Girls those characters that had fallen out of Cabaret or an Isherwood novel of the time. He captures a city that has underneath the horror that happened in the 15 years after he walk the city. meandering the city that would a few years later be gone. The longest piece is on a tour called the tour of the churches like St Peters etc. Also the old Royal buildings of Berlin, and the National Gallery. This is a flaneur a wander of the city this metropolis his fellow citizens. Then the Zoo places like the Newspaper district a place I wonder is dead like Fleet Street its London counterpart.

Excursioners in light-colored skirts and shift dresses climb the steps leading up to the station. Those lucky things, enjoying such a nice autumn day. Some also go through the narrow entrance to the little Wannsee train station. What I’d really like to do is follow them. A sail. boat, or even just a paddleboat.1 Potsdam and the Havel. see, the secret soul of Berlin, otherworldly places here on earth! And today a weekday. But now we’re arriving at Potsdamer Platz. The first thing to say about it is that it isn’t really a plaza at all, but rather what they call a carrefour in Paris, a crossroads, an intersection; we don’t really have the right word for it in German. That Berlin once came to an end at the city gate here, with country roads branching off from it–you’d have to have a well-informed eye to recognize that from the shape of the inter-section.

Part of the longest section of the book the Tour which remind me of Bois as Homer as he walked down Potsdamer Platz

Another image that came to mind when I read this was of Homer played by Curt Bois in Wings of desire (I so want the blu ray box set of Wenders going out soon but it is out of my price range I’ll have to wait). Bois’s character is seeking what was Potsdamer Platz in the rubble of the city in the late 80s. Bois walk also has old film of Potsdamer back in the day (Hessel is by Potsdamer in the section Fashion around Fashion houses and shops in the city and also the tor section). It’s a Shame Hessel died in the early years of the war in France a follow-up to this would be great like Swinton and my own remembrance of the city I have only been for a day and wish I could go back to Berlin it is a city that has had so many changes in the nearly hundred years since this book came out. This book is a forerunner of Psychogeography a distant cousin of Benjamins Opus to Paris Arcades (I have been reading this on and off for years ). Have you read this or any other great flaneur works of people wandering cities on foot and just taking it in like it was new and fresh to the writer’s eyes.

Winston’s score – A- a gem from this week’s 1929 club reminds me of a place I’d love to go and explore more and each for his ghosts and the ghost of what happened.

Cinema Stories by Alexander kluge

Cinema Stories by Alexander kluge

German fiction

original title – Geschichten vom Kino

translators – Martin Brady and Helen Hughes

Source – personal copy

If you have been following me for the last couple of years you will know since I discovered the works of Alexander Kluge. for me he should be better known than he is all those people going on about Sebald well this guy is like him but has been writing his documentary-style fiction usually around an event or subject I have reviewed four books by him so far. I have just been navigating on a personal odyssey through his works as I buy them. This is one of the books that maybe cross over his two main fields of filmmaker and writer. As ever it is a series of Vignettes 39 in total.

The ELDORADO movie theatre was located close to the border dividing the centre of Beirut from the South of the city, and still within the area destroyed by aerial bombing. Razed to the ground, only the foundation remained. The married couple who had run the venue for decades had cleared away the rubble and erected a tent on the flat concrete floor of the building, The projectors, which had been rescued, stood under this tent. In front of them, are rows of makeshift seats (chairs from a cafe); and in front of those, the screen. The sound of battle, sometimes coming closer, sometimes moving away, merged with the soundtrack of the films. The audience was somewhat safer under this tented roof than in the surviving houses, because destroyed buildings were seldom attacked for a second time and also because in this “cinema auditorium” there was no danger of being buried by falling masonry

The opening of the book and the story cinema in a state of Emergency

I will mention a few of the vignettes and leave you a lot to discover they are all around the subject of cinemas. The collection opens with a story that is a little way reminds me of a scene from the film Cinema Paradiso this is the story of a cinema in Beirut and the couple that ran the Eldorado cinema trying to keep it running with the war going on and how they showed whatever they could get hold of it to remind of when the cinema burnt down in cinema Paradiso and the carried on. Then we see how Erich Von Stroheim maybe was one of the first people in the film industry to invent who he was not the son of a hatmaker from Vienna he became a von and lived up whole was working his way up through the cinema. Then he turns to Walter Benjamin and his observations on how cinema and films can be used as propaganda. Then I read one that was a connection to a book that I had read that was by the wife of the Filmmaker Joris Ivens here we see how when his filming was interrupted by rain he then made a piece describing fourteen types of rain, like rain in the country, never-ending rain and the concentrated rain in Hurricanes. This is just a glimpse of the book I feel it is hard to write about many of the 39 vignettes in the collection.`I want to leave a few to be discovered.

1 A week of Rain with Joris Ivens

The radical documentarist Joris Ivens took advantage of a week of rain in Holland, during which he couldn’t shoot anything else, to film variations on the theme of rain. Hannes Eisler later composed music for these film sequences. His piece is called fourteen ways to describe rain

It reminds me of how many words the Inuit have for snow types and looks of snow. And how many words do we have for rain here in the UK!!

 

this book mixes the two worlds that Alexander Kluge is best known for cinema there is a real sense of some of these small tales he’ll have heard over the years and then he has used his writing talent to bring some of those sorts of insider tales gems he will have heard or even been involved with. The vignettes cover a myriad of subjects from actual cinemas, to what the power of film is to actors, filmmakers and myths of cinema. For me he is a writer you just want to read cover to cover in every book he is like that uncle with the great stories we all have someone that can talk and describe the world around us and make it interesting and Kluge’s world is c=inema he is an insider and these are those tales. I am still not sure why he isn’t better known here in English maybe it is the fact he falls in between styles of writing as a writer he has parts of short stories, narrative non-fiction, memoir or documentary fiction he is a polymath a true gem of the German cultural scene. Have you a favourite book from Kluge?

Winstons score – + A compelling vignette around his other job as a filmmaker.

After Midnight by Irmgard keun

After Midnight by Irmagard keun

German fiction

Original title – Nach Mitternacht

Translator – Anthea Bell

Source – library

I got this as I reviewed  Child of all nations by her last November and fell in love with her writing style which seems to perfectcly captures the world of being just an adult and her again the narrator is 19 Santa we are drawn into her world. This was the first book keun wrote herself after she went into exile from the Nazi regime herself as some of the novella parallels her own decision at the time to flee Germany. it also mixes the  actual events at the time such as Hitlers visit. which is set in the late 1930s follows what happens after the day Hitler visited Frankfurt  as we see the change of attitude sweeps over Germany at this time after people her him speak.it captures the country just as the madness that lead into the descent to war is just happening.

Gerti called for me at noon today, because she was going to buy a pink blouse and wanted me to come along to the shops and tell her which suited her best. Even Lisa says I have good taste in clothes, and people are always wanting me to knit them sweaters. Actually I can knit fast, and well. If I really do marry Franz, I can always earn us a little money by knitting. How ever, here in Frankfurt I’ve been moving in circles which are quite different from anything Franz is used to. I mis with high-class, rich, intelligent people here. Franz wouldn’t know what to say to them

I loved how even thou it is nearly 90 years old Sanna at times is so now.

Our narrate is Sanna she has lived with her aunt for a time but when some of the view she says about the way some of the Nazi leader talk it means that it has a knock on effect when those near her aunt and her cousin that she has feeling fall call in the police so she moves to Frankfurt to live with her half brother Alois and his wife in Frankfurt with his wife that is an artist this is also where she connects with Gerti whom has a fallen for a Jewish boy all this happens whilst we see the views of those around them harden as Hitler is due to come to Frankfurt and speak. what we see is the world she knows shrinking as those she is friends with either start to think about leaving or become entranced with the rhetoric of Hitler. Alois her brother is already at odds as his books have been banned and when she sees the effect on there wider circle of friends like Gerti’s love dieter there comes that time to decide what to do stay or go. the last few chapters also introduce an older character as they decide what they are doing.

But politics is in there air even the Ladies these days. Gerti says she supposes it’s something if you find one without a lavatory attendant who expects you to say “Heil Hitler” and wants ten pfeninigs into bargain

And now, suddenly, Gerti is weeping bitterly =, because she didn’t see Dieter Aaron today. So I have to comfort her. Why does a girl like Gerti have to go falling love with a banned person mixed race, for goodness sake when there are plenty men around the authorities would let her love? Its hard enough to know your way around the rules the authorities lay down for business, as we all know, ban be very tricky organised- and now we have to know the rules for love too

This captures the slowly creeping changes in the world but shows how hard they hit

What she does so well her is uses Sanna eyes a young woman just wanting to be a young woman at the time. Some of the bits I love is the usual teen things she is trying to do but then sees the events of the time stopping or changing what they can do.we then see how this chain of events is impacting on her life from having to leave her aunts to the time in Frankfurt when the attitudes of those around them changes as views become juxtapose and the way forward is split into accepting the status quo keeping quiet and not being able to be yourself. the other option is to flee and go into exile this actual series of events follows much of the decisions that Irmgard Keun followed herself. Her books were banned like Alois books were at the time. She also linked to actual events at the time which was Hitlwers list to Frankfurt when he spoke at the Opernplatz. It also captures the way German was changing and how some never spoke up and others used the way things were for other reasons like the events around her Aunt where was it what she said or the fact that she was falling for her cousin. Have you read her books where should  I go after this one ?

Winstons score – + b It captures the times well as the country is on the tip of entering war and the horrors that followed through a young persons eyes.

Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp

Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp

German fiction

Original title – Marzahn, mon amour: Geschichten einer Fußpflegerin

Translator – Jo Heinrich

Source – review copy

I have been a fan of Peirene press since they started and have reviewed most of their books of the time of blog which is about time they have been bringing out books they bring out their books out every year around a theme and here is the first book in this year’s series a book that was chosen for Berlins one book where the city all read a book at the same time I love that idea. Any way Katja Oskamp is from the same area of East Berlin and was well received with her first work the Halbeschwimmer a collection of short stories that dealt with the falling of East Germany from the view of a teen swimmer. This book is the first since she trained herself as a podiatrist a job she has been doing for the last seven years. This book also follows a middle-aged writer in what is called in the intro of the book those invisible fizzy years when you are too far from the shore you started and it is out of sight and is not near enough to the end shore of life. I love that description as someone caught in the fuzzy time myself.

Frau Guse parks her walking frame and hangs her jacket on the coat stand, breathing heavily. She waddles into the chiropodist’s room with her shopping bag and sits down on the chiropody chair. I help her take off her shoes and socks and roll up her trouser legs. Together we lower her feet into the footbath I’ve prepared, I pluck two gloves frk their box and slip them on, turning to frau Guse who mentions as she does at this point every time, that she has had breat cancer, I nod and say as I do at this point every time, that her her operation was almost seven years ago and that the tablets she’s had to take ever since have terrible side effects, such as shortness of breath and diarrohoea.

One of her first clients Frau Guse.

The book is a series of vignettes of the clients our newly qualified Podiatrist meets when she retrains as one as she is struggling to make ends meet as a writer so when she starts working she meets the locals of Marzahn a run-down part of Berlin as it is described in one of the German reviews outside the ringbahn the central part of Berlin. Starting with an elderly lady Frau Guse a survivor of Breast cancer as she rubs the dead skin of her feet she sighs a colourful woman in loose clothes hiding her missing breast I love the detail she observes in the people whose feet she works on. One that really struck me as she says the is those that feel that Marzahn has many former GDR bigwigs or Sed officials but it isn’t except for one of her clients the cold Herr Pietsch as she described him as a dye in the wool party member he has a sort of detached manner with her that is in contrast to most of the other clients in the book. I’m only mentioned three of the clients as it will leave loads for you like me the reader to discover the last is Gerlinde as she says the area of Marzahn has many refugees and she is one from Prussia that fled to Berlin near the end of the second world war often in her plastic shoes how with her family fled on a ship called the Lappland back in the day. but never got that far when the ship didnt’t get too far and they end up on a refugee train and end up in Berlin.

Herr pietsch, taking off his shoes and socks, stares out of the window. By now I know the routine: he is always wary at first , only to drastically overstep the mark later. I bend down, push the footbath into place and look up into his protruding eyes – two bulging orbs. Herr pietsch speaks with a Thuringian- Saxon accent, a little indistinctly as he’s  on his thiurd set of teeth: “There are certainly a few things I’m not happy with, but I”m getting by. I’m on top of life ”

One of her clients as she bserves is an old party Type!!

As you can see I loved this there is a warm heart to these little vignettes and to the characters she meets someone’s foot maybe tell as much as a  hands do about our lives. what comes across is that even in the most down and out areas like Marzahn as it is observed by one of the characters it is built on a former sewage farm site. The character with her job occupies the same space as the Hairdresser or the barman someone that people tend to open up to maybe a little more than they would in over situations small talk but over time as in these vignettes it sometimes grows and yes like frau use who seems to have a script of her life or maybe this is also a sign of her having dementia as she often recounts the same story over and over again. This is a slice of those that are often passed as I described in a review years ago the flotsam and jetsam of the world those that can’t escape where they are or maybe just have always been there I was also reminded of the Character that was played by Curt Bois Homer an elderly poet in the film Wings of desire or in its German title Der Himmel uber Berlin another glimpse behind the net curtains and high rise of Berlin. Characters who like Homer is looking for a way home to their past this is the case in a lot of these vignettes the past weights heavy in their tales at times it ? if you are a fan of interlinking stories or stories about everyday folk this will appeal. Have you read this collection ?

Winstonsdads score – +A A great collection of vignettes about the locals of a high rise rundown area of Berlin.

The Voice Imitator by Thomas Bernhard

The Voice Imator by Thomas Bernhard

Austrian fiction

Original title – Der Stimmenimitator

Translator – Kennerth J Northcott

Source – personal copy

I am a little late start this week Bernhard week sorry anyway it is the second time I have done a week dedicated to the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I am a fan of his work he has a style I like his characters always seem to be at odds with the society they are in and he has a very caustic way of looking at the world around him till now all the books I have reviewed on the blog have been novels or novellas nine of his books I have reviewed I also have a piece from the last Bernhard week by the writer Andrej Nikolaidis he wrote for this blog about his love of the writer and his importance to his journey as a writer. So welcome to the third Bernhard week well let’s say fortnight this week and next week. Have you a favourite book by him? I now get on to his collection of microfiction

A man from Ausburg was comitted to the Ausburg lunatic assylum merely because, throughout his life he had claimed at every possible opportunity that Goethe’s last words were mehr nicht ( no more) tather than mehr licht (more light) , something that in the long run and as time went on, is said to have frayed the nerves of those with whom he came in contact that hey banded together to get this ausburger , so unhappily obsessed with his claimm comitted to a lunatic assylum. It is reported that six doctors refused to commit him to a lunatic asylum but that the seventh immediately arranged to have him committed. This doctor was, as I learned from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, decorated with the Goethe badge of the city of Frankfurt for his efforts.

The story the Claim about a man that refused to change his mind of Goethes last words!!

This is a collection of 104 stories or more snippets none is more than a single page most are just a few lines he has taken headlines tales he has heard and turned them into 104 stories there is a number of recurring themes in the stories such as Madness, bad luck, death and suicides these characters all have a little touch of what you expect from Bernhard he has touched on Madness in Wittigensteins Nephew which was set in an asylum which a number of these stories are one had a real tongue in cheek comic turn a man sent to asylum only after a number of doctors had refused to the last doctor said yes what was up with him as he refused to admit that his version of what were the last words of Goethe was no more (Mehr Nicht) as opposed to the given which is more light (Mere Licht). Then an orchestra plays and the audience claps encore after encore only to be told they had played to the Deaf school. The death of a woodcutter reminds me of the title of one of his other books. A man that was Tito’s double these tales he took from all over the place and range from comic to sad to profound to surreal.

A so- called Chamber Music asscociation famous for playing only ancient music on original tnstruments and for having only Rossini, frescobaldi, Vivaldi, and Pergolesi in its repertoire was playing in an old castle in the Atterseeand had its greatest success since it was founded. The applause continued intil the Chamber Music Association did not have a single encore left on its program to play. It was not until the next day that the Musicians were told that they had been playing in an institute for death mutes.

The story The most successful concert an orcestra plays a number of encores and then are told the truth.

 

I had wanted to try a few of the other things he had written so choose this for this year I will next year be doing either the poetry collections of his plays. This collection reminds me style-wise of things Kluge does in his writing where he uses snippets of this and that to build a whole and this is what happens here as the stories unfold themes grow like the books by Luis Sagasti his two books have underlying themes and his style of storytelling is very short like these. a writer that jumps to my mind a couple of times in some of the stories was Saki yes Saki there is a similar feel Saki had a great way of being quick caustic and comic at the same time something Bernhard pulls of so well here. It shows he must have worried about his own sanity at times it crops up a lot in these stories as people end up in what would be on a ward like the ward I work on but not for LD patients. As over the years I have read so many books by him you can see in his work he walks that fine line of depression and stress it is almost as thou for Bernhard his writing was an outlet he had very bad health for most of his life. I enjoyed these collections as it was more accessible than his novels and has a little bit of what is in all his books. Have you read this or any other of his plays or poetry?

Winstons score – A – as much as I loved this in some way it is dated in the terms used and also some of the stories are close to the bone these days but they were written in a different era and most of them are great still.

 

 

The High Rise DIver by Julia Von Lucadou

The High Rise DIver by Julia Von Lucadou

German fiction

Original title – Die Hochausasspringerin

Translator – Sharmilaa Cohen

Source – review copy

I take another turn in this year’s German literature month. This time I have a new novel from a debut Novelist Julia Von Lucadou. She was nominated for the swiss book prize for this book. She had been working as an assistant director and editor before writing this novel. There is a sense as I read this that the person who wrote it had an eye for tv or film in the way it read as it paints a very visual world of a horrific near-future dystopic world. The book follows the decision of a HIgh rise diver to stop training.

The most popular internet conspiracy theory about Riva’s resignation is that it has to do with relationship dramam tht Riva left Aaston for someone else and that he’s now forcing her sto stay with him against her will A well-known gossip blog regularly posts drone videos of them in their apartment,alleging violent situations. Analysis has shown that the images are current, but were manipularted after the fact. Fans post comments daily on Riva’s offical website, encouraging her to be brave ad urging the police to arrest Aston. Building security has been reporting break-in attempts by fans trying to “Free” Riva.

A world of twisted videos and threoies of what is happening.

The book follows what happens when Riva who is the High rise diver of the title a superstar of her time in a world where her every move is followed by her fans. This is a world where people don’t always have a birth family that they live with or as it is called here Bio parents. But they are bred from Breeders !  and then raised within organizations. So when Riva goes off the rails stops training and resigns. She needs to be brought back in line we meet Hitomi who has to try and bring Riva back to the High rise diving and training and for the investors to continue to make money from Riva. So the world we enter everyone sees everything as the world is now full of camera that follows people like Riva’s every move as we see Hitomi trying hard to push her back into the high rise dive programme all part of a new culture of celebs that the peripheral as they called follow those born and working for these huge companies. What we see is a woman trying to break free in a world where everyone now has a place in this new disturbing world of children growing up in companies without families in a new horrific world. A world not far moved from our own culture these days of celebs and increasingly intrusive media. will they get Riva Back will Hitomi survive if she doesn’t !!

“The smell of the peripheries always made me nausesous as a child. I would already start to feel sick days before a compulsory casting. During the casting, I had to take medication to avoid vomitinf on stage. The heatm the smog. My skin grayinsh, sickly after just a few hours, I showered several times a day. Andorra made fun of me. She didn’t mind the dirt and the bad air. She was ecited when the next casting approached. She believed in being chosen, in making early breakthrough. I reminded her of the statsitics abd thet we weren’t dependent on being chosen. That our education at the institute separeted us from the unpredictability of a casting jury. But Andorra lost any semblance of being a rational person when it came to our future. When I had long since given on the dream of high rise diving.

The world is set the divides are there from the start in this world !

I don’t read a lot of sci-fi but when I do it would be dystopic works I would pick. Here is a book that has a world that isn’t that far from our own. In Riva her character isn’t far from the character of Syliva in the recent Polish film “Sweat that follows her Online world and the consequences of her growing stardom which saw her have a stalker.  The struggle of having to appear on cam all the time !!. In the other parts of this world, the mega-companies as iot seems is another thing that is with us from Google, Meta, Amazon etc. Then if we look at the work culture of Japan where there is a sense of work for a company singing for them etc. Here is a world where Riva isn’t a person more a product to be marketed and sold as a package to her fans so when this product goes off the rails we see how Hitomi tries various increasingly more pressure on Riva to push her back into place. So if you have like books like Handmaiden tale or Orwellian universes this is a book for you. it follows the modern world of a new sports star and the dark turns and corners of a celeb world. Have you a favourite dystopic world? do you think the worlds media is too intrusive these days?

Winstons score – B A clever take on the world of Celeb and its increasing intrusion and commodifying nature

All the Land by Jo Lendle

All the Land by Jo Lendle

German fiction

original title – Alles Land.

Translator – Katy Derbyshire

Source – Personal copy

I’m on another of this year’s german lit choices. l I am now in Greenland partly for this book based on an actual person Alfred Wenger the son of the Minister for Berlin in the early thirties he was an explorer and scientist for the next book for my German Lit month books. A novel from Jo Lendle the Publisher of Hanser Verlag, he is the editor of the lit Magazine Akzente. He has lectured on German literature been involved in German pen. He has also translated a number of books including books by Jachym Topol. He has published a number of novels this is the first book by him I have read.

Alfred Wegener had more siblings than one would wish upon a person. They stood around him and stared at him, elbowing each other and pointing at him, some even grabbing over the woven edge of the willow cradle to pinch him , out of love.

It cost his mother some effort to hold the children back. The birth had taken twenty-four hours, a whole day . It Hard to unsettle a woman like Anna Wegener, but attempting to restrain this horde had her at her wit’s end

his Birth and the Orphans gather round see his birth

I hadn’t heard of Alfred Wegener when I read this book I read his Wiki page and got the sense he was like many of the British explorers of the time. What we see here is him in 1930 as he is stuck trying to survive in the middle of Greenland one of the most remote places in the world on the mid -ice as it is called and also one of the coldest on the planet as he and his team have set off to see if they can get by and to study the weather and survive the conditions this was his fourth trip to Greenland the first was around the time he had to meet his with Else. The book sees his attempts to be both a successful family man.  He was brought up by his parents in an Orphanage so he want to be a real father and husband. The fact he was called into to fight in world one means that the years away from his wife they have drifted apart. We see the romance and his earliest years growing up. He tried his best he thinks but as he looks back we see that wasn’t always so. this is what he is most famous for in a way his studies of weather and things like continental drift. This is a tale of one of those men that like his British counter parts tried to push back the barriers of what men can do endure and see. the furthest the coldest etc.

Early in 1906, he read in the newspaper about a plan for a Danish expedition to north-eastern Greenland, which was to spend two summers charting the coastline. Under the writer Mylius Erichsen’s command , they would attempt to cross the ice of the greenland sea to ereach the spot where the Germania expedtion had been forced to turn back in 1870, and set up a base from there, they hoped to explore the unknown section to cape bridgeman,

A base station in the ice. All that could be studied there! Wegener closed his eyes. It required some effort to gather his wishes.

The  report that maybe inspired him to do his expeditions to Greenland, a few years later.

This is the second novel based on this last expedition on his Wiki page for Alfred Wegener it said this last expedition had inspired John Buchan to write his novel A Prince of captivity three years after the events. What we have here is an in-depth novel about his life that mixes the actual facts with what Lendle feels must have been Wegener’s thoughts of his own life as they sit in freezing weather and looks back over his life. I loved the flow of the book I ‘ve always been a fan of stories around the pole regions things like the worst journey in the world which in parts this reminds me of or a film like Scott of the antarctic the is a part where they cut back on what they are carrying you can see where the story will end it reminds me in parts of Scoots story or more so the Shakleton Television series that followed his life as the relationship of husband and wife when they spent time apart was similar. Have you read any books by Lendle or have a favorite book set in the Polar regions. So if you like a tale of a man how tried his best in everything and in many ways was very human this is a book that you should enjoy. As he is a flawed character but aren’t we all !!

Winstons score – B+ A well-written novel about a man that we should know more about!

Child of All Nation by Irmgard Keun

Child of All Nation by Irmgard Keun

German fiction

Original title – Kind aller Länder

Translator -Michael Hofmann

Source – Personal copy

We go back with my next read for German Lit Month and a  modern Classic a book that seem to be everywhere last year I hadn’t read anything by her I was vaguely aware of her connection to Roth not sure if I heard a review of one of her books or read it in another book. She had been married but left her husband in the early thirties when he got drawn in by the Nazi party. She then had a relationship with a Jewish doctor then spent time with the writer Joseph Roth and she traveled around Europe he was a huge influence on her writing. it is felt that the father figure in the book is a write like Joseph Roth. Like Roth, he also criticized the Nazis Keun herself had seen her books withdrawn by the Nazis. A gem of pre-war german Literature that signaled what was to come and the attempt to flee from the shadow of the Nazis.

Then my father suddenly walked into our hotel room where I was crying and my mother ewas groaning, and said to my mother. “Well a mircale has happened – it might yet save us. I’ve just had a call from Tulpe. You don’t know him; well, I don’t know him either, I crossed paths with him once in Berlin. He reads my books , heard I was in town, called me. He travels in Ladies underwear, I beleive; probably has a bank account- rock solid character. Two thousand francs will be enough to get us out of trouble. I can’t pay him back with the fights to the polish translations. The money for that is due in the next few weeks.

Her father tries to scrape together enough money for them to get by.

I am a fan of child narrators when done well and here in Kully the ten-year-old daughter of Peter a writer who is outspoken about the changes he has seen in the time since the Nazis seized power in Germany (much the same as Roth did at the time). This means that Kully her mother and her father are exiled from Germany what we see is the journey around Europe from hotel to hotel as they head from country to country as their visas, funds, and options dwindle a journey that many made at the time. But as this also happens her father is still talking and wanted. He is a chancer and liar to ht mother and her. He is trying to get as they are constantly on the run though he is constantly wanting the family to move on from hotel to hotel but as he heads out to settle them in a new hotel leaving her l=mother and her to sneak off. We see a girl that is a bit wild she smokes sees what is happening but has that childlike view of what is happening she is just caught up in the journey here there and everywhere. A path that many did in those pre-war years.

My mother says my father can’t settle the hotel bill from Warsaw anyway, because the Polish goverment dosen’t alow you to send mony out of Poland. My father often tells fibs to get a bit of peace and quiet. We’re happy about that sometimes, though he performs miracles and everything he says comes true.

My mother is crimping her hair in front of the mirror, she wants to have a round curl either side of her fac, to make her look beautiful.If she looks beautiful, she feels better abiout walking through the lobby, or talking to people to ask them for money: I don’t mind not looking beauitful.

I loved this image of her mother very thirties sounding

I said I like Child narrators when they are done well and Kully voice is so evocative a girl that is a little wild due to the lack of boundaries she is a brat but she is caught in this downward spiral of running from Place to Place. This is a book I am pleased I tried I tend to be put off when I see translations that seem overhyped or here there and everywhere. In  Peter, we have a writer that is like Roth a writer that stirred up the Nazis Roth himself like Peter went out of Germany when Hitler came to power. Roth never got fully away. This is like the Passenger I read earlier this year we see the journey of trying to escape the the Nazis. This is a path that many trod at the time and here we have an angle from the view of a child grasping at the facts seeing her father pushed out aware of what happens but in the black and white nature only children have. I must read her other books which would you recommend?

Winstons score – B a child’s eye view of a horrific time

One day a Year (2001-2011) by Christa Wolf

One day a year by Christa Wolf

German Memoir

Original title – Ein Tag im Jahr.

Translator _ Katy Derbyshire

Source – personal copy

I had wanted to read the first of the two series of diaries (well not sure if that is a right yearly observation)  That Christa Wolf had lept she choose just one day the same day every year to write a diary entry, these entries are both Personal and observant of the world around her she had done this for 40 years from 1960 – 2000. The date 27th September every year.  Which made the first volume of this book which came out in the early 2000s and with the cheapest second-hand copy online for 50 pounds I made do with the second collection that came out after her death and was edited By Her husband Gerd who observes that the entries since 2001 were of a more personal nature than the earlier ones. So what is collected here is the last ten entires of her life which ended shortly after the last year 2011.

I remember that two questions arose within me in a short space of time while I stood in the unfamilar room, hypnotized by Implausible TV images: is this how the Third World War begins? And is this beginning of the end? O began to work on these questions while I packed up my manuscript and then had to wait a long time for the taxis, which had been held up by an ordinary traffic jam, while the reporters stunned and agitated voices came over the car radion and driver, a measured man, to my relief, showed shock and sympathy. These two sentences have accopmpanied me since then, as statments, as words of doubt, aswuestions, and they have produced varying answeres, none of which is enough for me.

The aftermath of 9/11 and where we on the edge of destruction ?

In regards of a time to start this book the fact that in 2001 the entry came just over a fortnight after 9/11 Wolf observes a world on the end after the collapsing of the twin towers, she has her 9/11 moment that second when we all saw what happened that day and the aftermath which by the time she wrote two weeks later had seen the eys of the world turning to Afghanistan. The other part of the entry talks of her life and this is how the book progresses the events of the day but nothing quite touches 9/11 in fact she observes how few of these events like 9/11 there are where we all see what has happened We also see the change in Germany over these first years of the century a while after reunification and her view on the politics and politicians. This also saw Merkel come to power a figure from the East Like Wolf herself. We also see how those writers and people she had known as her contemporaries are now dying. People like Andre Gorz Wolf had loved his poems to his dead wife which I had enjoyed. She tells us about other books including The tower by Uwe Tellkamp a book I loved but she didn’t like it much. She and Gerd s are starting to see her age creeping in as she struggles, she is also struggling writing her last book City of Angels. This is an insight into the twilight years of one of the leading figures of German Literature.

The television news show has no progress to report between the negotiation partners towards a grand coalition, but it is genrally accepted that thats where we’re heading. The commentators predict that Schroder will have to step back, possibility also Angela Merkel. Up to thi point, both parties are still insisting in the chancellor’s post. In the middle east, the just cleared Gaza strip is being bombed by the Isarelis again because rockets were fired at them from there. Tinka and Maritn are flying to Isarel in a group gthe day after tomorrow.

The edge of Merkel become Chancellor described which she still is just 16 years later.

This is the second book I have reviewed on the blog by the Late Christa Wolf, both non-fiction works I will review a work of fiction next from her. I enjoyed this as it covered the year I remember and also saw the change in Germany when Merkel came to power halfway through the book What comes across is the loss of what she had hoped we see with her talking of how she had voted for the linke party the left-wing socialist party her lament for what could have been this is a writer seeing her life slipping through her fingers as she struggles with her memory, walking and getting up the stairs. It captures the struggle of growing old also the way we view the world when age makes us view the mistakes of the past and the problems oif the present I felt this worked without reading the first book which if I see a cheap copy one day I will get one. This is one for fans of Books Like Alan Bennetts diaries or like me of German Lit fan. This is my third read for this year’s German Lit month where will I go next in Germany ?

WInstons score – A an interesting look at the last embers of a great writer