Tag: German

Vacation Reading List: Kiruna

By the time this post goes live, I’ll be sitting on a train to? from? Boden, en route to Kiruna for an eleven-day break from the grind. My plan is to visit the big hole in the ground, maybe take in a couple museums, and catch up on my reading backlog. To that end, my list!

Resan till Armenien, Osip Mandelstam

This was a recommendation from a book friend. I started it back in February but quickly realized I would want the time to really focus on it, in part due to lots of new vocabulary. That time has come.

Livet måste ha mening, Victor Frankl

A democratically chosen book for the philosophy reading group I’m in. Unfortunately I find that as the group grows larger,  the suggestions devolve into academically dubious pseudo-intellectual New Age claptrap. But I’ll still read this to see for myself! And to remind the group members who suggested this that Frankl was out there trepanning suicidal Jewish people from 1940 to 1942.

Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Marguerite Duras

I am far, far behind on my French reading goal for the year. Duras to the rescue! I’ll also be reading the Swedish translation.

Bastarden från Istanbul, Elif Shafak

The July pick for my international WhatsApp book club. It’s the longest book on this list, so we’ll see if I finish it or even get around to it.

Förvandlingen

I’m in a philosophy book and discussion club, which is responsible for a small chunk of the nonfiction I manage to get through during the year. Once in a while, however, the group votes for a novel instead of a strict philosophical treatise. That’s how I finally got around to reading Brave New World, for example. Fiction won again in the most recent poll and the book for June was Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, known in Swedish as Förvandlingen and in English as The Metamorphosis.

I’d read it in high school, but since forgotten most of it. Since Kafka was a prominent figure in 1913, it seemed like a good time for me to return to the text regardless. I opted for a Swedish translation, even though my memory of the English is obviously quite dim.

There is a strong tradition in Swedish of translated German literature, so unsurprisingly there are multiple Swedish translations of Förvandlingen. The first one I got ahold of was the older one by Caleb J. Anderson and Karl Vennberg, originally published by Forum but now in a new edition from Modernista. I also managed to dig up the newer one from Hans Blomqvist and Erik Ågren at Bakhåll, complete with an afterword. I’m in the process of polling Swedes in my life about which one they prefer and why, and so far I have to say that there’s no clear winner.

That’s probably the most interesting thing to say about The Metamoporphosis. We all know the story and the famous opening line, what more need be said?

Here’s one nugget from high school that has stayed with me ever since, maybe because it’s only become even more relevant to me as an adult: if you take away the magical event of the first sentence, The Metamorphosis becomes one of the most realistic books ever written, an unflinching portrayal of how families respond to disability or illness.

I don’t know which critic or which writer it was. If memory serves, and it was indeed my twelfth grade English teacher who relayed it to me, then it has to predate 2004. Otherwise, I cobbled together my actual English class and an actual, later quote into a false memory. Regardless of where I first heard it, that quote has been kicking around in my head for years and I finally got to put it to the test, as it were, by coming back to The Metamorphosis over twenty years later. Bang on, I would say.

Djinns

Fatma Aydemir’s Djinns was another selection for my international WhatsApp book club. We have a lot of Turkish and German (and expats in Turkey and Germany) representation, so a German novel about a Turkish family in Germany was a logical choice.

Djinns is a quasi-multigenerational story, where each member of a Turkish nuclear family living in Germany stars in their own sections. The book starts with the father, Hüseyin, who has finally retired and moved to Istanbul, to the new apartment he’s managed to purchase through years of hard work and meticulous savings and where he imagines his family’s future happiness. From there we spend a section with each of the children (Umit, Peri, Hakan, and Sevda) and end with the mother (Emine). That’s a very dry description of a very involved, serious, sensitive book, but any more details than that and I would spoil the whole thing. It’s a masterpiece, and the English translation by Jon Cho-Polizzi is very thoughtfully done, with a foreword on various racialized terms and slang as well as a glossary of untranslated Turkish (and possibly also Kurdish?) terms in the back.

The Turkish-Kurdish owner and bartender at my local watering hole is probably around the same age as Hüseyin. He’s hospitable and very chatty, and if you show up with any regularity, you get to know him pretty quickly. His wife and kids are a recurring topic, and they must be about the same age as their counterparts in Djinns. They’re also a recurring topic between myself and my Njals saga book buddy and fellow patron: what’s it like to grow up as a secular Swede with a father like Ali, we wonder. What’s it like to be married to be married to him?

So I wonder if the secrets and relationships in Djinns are something Ali and his family would recognize. From my perspective, Aydemir captures how the tension between two cultures exacerbates the normal stresses and conflicts that arise in any family. No-No Boy is a comparison that comes to mind. But without that lived experience, of course, it’s hard for me to say for sure.

1913: Århundradets sommar

Sometimes I wonder if specific book friends should get their own tag, for my own ease of reference if nothing else. So much of my reading can be traced back to recommendations and influences from people I like!

1913: Århundradets sommar, originally published in German as 1913: Der Sommer des Jahrhunderts and known in English as 1913: The Year Before the Storm, is simply the account of a single year in Europe from the perspective of numerous writers and artists (as well as a couple notable politicians). The same book friend for whose sake I made a third and final attempt to read To the Lighthouse and to whom I had gifted The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, who lives next door to the author of Årsboken and who had also recommended Njals Saga, pressed a slightly beat-up paperback copy of 1913 into my hands back in January or February. I started immediately, stopped when I realized I simply had too much else going on at the time (trying to get through Svälten and Kusinerna for assorted book clubs on top of Peak Work Season), and picked it up again on a long weekend in London.

An aside about the weekend jaunt to London: I scheduled a dinner at a Korean restaurant in London, the irresistibly named Koba, as a reward for surviving the first part of Kammarkollegiet’s authorization test for translators. (I passed that part, by the way!) I also have a friend in London who lets me stay at his place when I turn up there, the same friend who recommended Miljosvennar and who gifted me a few of his science fiction favorites (including Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco) after he cleaned out his bookshelf, who is one of the few people in my life to get a birthday present from me every year without fail only because I have a strong sense of Books He Should Read. It seems to be a fairly unerring sense as well, since he actually reads them and during one visit to Stockholm even remarked that I always manage to find interesting books he would have never known about or picked for himself. The same friend was also knocked the heck out from a gnarly viral infection, so his natural urge to play host and show off Hackney Wick was severely dampened by the sad state of his physical constitution. After a solo morning museum visit and walk through the park, I spent the entire afternoon of my last day there in bed reading while my host picked away at a programming task.

“I’m sorry you’re cooped up in here,” he said after an hour or two of companionable silence.

“No! No. This is exactly the kind of vacation I wanted. It’s fine.”

That is how I managed to read the bulk of 1913 over a single weekend. That’s exactly the kind of attention it deserves, because it’s full of names and events that keep recurring or developing; you don’t want to take a two week break and come to find you lost track of what Franz Kafka or Carl Schmidt was up to. Illies turns what could have been dry reportage into insightful, dare I say sensitive narrative. Presumably some poetic license is taken (did so-and-so really see so-and-so walking down the street as he gazed out his window?) but Illies has pages and pages of personal diaries and letters to draw from, so he can get quite close to his subjects. His background as an art historian probably means much of the subject matter was stuff he already had at hand, so to speak. Fair play also to Illies for giving as much consideration as possible to the notable women of the era, including their own perspectives and diary entries instead of just offhanded mentions about muses or mistresses or so on. Much like Svälten, Illies turns history into a narrative and the whole thing becomes deeply enjoyable reading despite the whirlwind of names and places.

The Swedish translation was done by Karin Andrae, who does not seem to have her own web presence anywhere that I can find. Here’s one selection from her translation catalogue over at Världslitteratur.se. She’s not listed at ÖversättareCentrum.se. There’s an article (and interview?) by Emilia Söelujnd behind the paywall of at least three regional newspaper clones: Tranås Tidning, Falköpings Tidning, Vetlanda-Posten, and probably more.

Imagine having such a reputation in translation that you don’t need to be worried about marketing yourself or having A Presence. The dream…

Letters to a Young Poet

Who has two thumbs and is constitutionally incapable of going on vacation without purchasing a book or two? This girl!

I stumbled on Ivallan’s Secondhand and Exceptional Books on a quest to patronize the legendary Bei Slawinchen on a recommendation from a coworker. Bei Slawinchen didn’t happen, whether because it was closed for renovations or because I wasn’t cool enough to be let in (maybe both), but the trip out to Neukölln was worth it for Ivallan’s. Did I spend three hours browsing? Yes! Did the staff at any time pressure me to pay up and get out of the tiny space? No! Did they in fact help me locate an upcoming book club read? Yes! (I didn’t end up buying it, but paging through a couple chapters was enough for me to decide that it wouldn’t be for me.) I wandered around with various books in hand, waiting for my excruciatingly slow data connection to load library websites and my Storygraph TBR so I could check my spontaneous interests against books I was already planning to read or that I could borrow for free.

In the end I walked out with a novelty cross-stitch (“AWKWARD” in silver thread on green background), a bookmark I think I’ve already lost, and two slim volumes, one of which was the new Penguin Classics edition of Letters to a Young Poet, in a relatively new translation from German by Charlie Louth from 2011. Their collective weight was probably less than, or at most equivalent to, the copy of Wind, Sand and Stars that I had resigned myself to depositing at my hostel. Therefore, totally legitimate purchase: no net gain or loss.

On my last day in Berlin, I ended up sitting in a strandkorb at Tempelhof with some snacks and reading most of the book there, pausing occasionally to watch a family playing basketball. Contemplative. Idyllic.

A hundred years later, a lot has changed, but Rilke’s advice right from the third paragraph is still on point and perhaps the best advice any writer could get:

Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest regions of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night’s quietest hour: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if it should be affirmative, if it is given to you to respond to this serious question with a loud and simple “I must,” then construct your life according to this necessity; your life right into its most inconsequential and slightest hour must become a sign and witness of this urge.

Everything else is just details.

Austerlitz

Everyone in my book club was so utterly charmed by Aaliya from An Unnecessary Woman, and impressed with the breadth and depth of her literary references, that we decided to pick one of her favorites as a book club read for later. I was privately gunning for Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet but in the end we went with Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald.

I’m glad that this was the book we picked for June, and not earlier in the year when my brain would have been fried from work, because Sebald demands a lot from the reader. One book club member joked that they thought it would be an easier read because of the wide margins and all of the photos sprinkled throughout. Hah!

In addition to the near-complete lack of paragraph breaks, the narrative itself is deeply nested. We don’t follow the titular Jacques Austerlitz through his life in real time; the story unfolds as he tells it, over the course of several years at happenstance meetings, to the book’s anonymous narrator. The narrator, meanwhile, reveals so little about himself that he vanishes almost entirely into the scenery. The sentences are also dense and complicated, and while I can’t speak to the German original (or the English translation), in the Swedish that complexity takes the form of long asides in dependent clauses or adjectival phrases that almost feel like an entire extra sentence smuggled in the middle of the first one you were reading. I had to go back and re-read sentences on nearly every page because those clauses and asides aren’t always (usually aren’t) offset with commas and reading turned into a game of “find the conjugated verb.” You either need a sharp memory or a lot of uninterrupted reading time to make it through Austerlitz without losing your train of thought.

Beyond just the grammatic and syntactic overwhelm, Austerlitz is also full to the brim with historical anecdotes, references, and other asides that I hesitate to call “trivia” because a lot of them pertain directly to the Holocaust. Architecture! Nazi propaganda! Moths! Train stations! You come away with the sense that your head has not only been crammed full of Austerlitz’s biography but also random facts. Consensus among the book club was that Aaliya might just be much smarter and more elevated than us mere mortals. I might revisit An Unnecessary Woman (in ebook format for that search function!) to see exactly what Aaliya thought of it.

To get to the narrative itself, Austerlitz is a fictional account of a man named Jacques Austerlitz, who was sent off on one of the Kindertransport trains and grew up in Wales under the care of a minister and his wife. I used “fictional account” up there, but Sebald made it clear that he was inspired by the real-life case of Susi Bechhofer. Like Susi, Austerlitz’s adoptive parents do their best to erase memories of his previous life, including but not limited to changing his name. (Also like Susi, Austerlitz doesn’t learn about his double identity until he goes to sit an exam and the teacher instructs him to give his name as “Jacques Austerlitz” rather than “Dafydd Elias.”) Between a childhood devoid of warmth or affection and the suppressed trauma of being completely ripped away from his previous identity, Austerlitz struggles as an adult. While he excels academically and manages to become an art historian and teacher, he is never able to complete the book on architecture he had set out to write and eventually suffers a serious mental breakdown. After he returns to Prague as an adult and learns more about his parents, Austerlitz becomes a more integrated version of himself. Or so it seems. Is he better now? Is he not? What’s going to happen with him? Who knows! A more conventional story would have ended at Austerlitz’s funeral, or the narrator learning of Austerlitz’s death after the fact, but instead the two part ways and the narrator is left thumbing through Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom, which he received as a gift from Austerlitz.

Austerlitz is one of those books where even though I didn’t have fun (as such) reading it, I still…enjoyed? appreciated?…reading it. The whole thing is a technical marvel; despite the grammatic and syntactical complexity I mentioned before, you still have a sense of flow and the overall whole of the story (even if you can’t remember what was going on at the beginning of the sentence). There’s also an element of personal satisfaction in finishing a book like this akin to the odd occasion when I manage to run a 10K: it’s a good sign that my body (or in this case, my brain) is still capable of rising to such a challenge. At this point credit goes to Ulrika Wallenström‘s Swedish translation. I can only infer what the German might be like from the Swedish, after all. Never mind all of the names, official translations, and technical terms to check. Austerlitz might not have officially finished his book on architecture and history, but much of that preparatory research material permeates the story. No mean translation feat, this one.

Karavan: Minne

The theme for 2024’s first issue of Karavan was memory, and included a fair number of biographical essays from Julie Otsuka, Maaza Mengiste, Ann-Marie Tung Hermelin, and Nona Fernández. Otsuka’s The Swimmers and Mengiste’s The Shadow King went on my TBR as a result.

This issue also featured rising stars within Brazilian literature. In addition to Jeferson Tonório, who was the subject of a feature length précis by Balsam Karam in the previous issue, Isi de Paula highlighted several other names: Geovani Martins, Itamar Vicira Junior, Luciany Aparecida, Stênio Gardel (The Words that Remain), Micheliny Verunschk, Carla Madeira, Aline Bei, and Mariana Salomão Carrara. de Paula also sat down for an interview with Tatiana Salem Levy (The House in Smyrna).

“Kino Karavan,” the recurring movie column, highlighted the animated film adaptation of Sultana’s Dream, El sueño de la sultana.

The translator’s diary column focused on Meta Ottosson’s work on Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor‘s Dust. I always find this segment to be an interesting peek into the lives of others, since literary translation is such a different beast from what I do. Ottosson chronicles her attempts to find the right words for things like buses, pole dance terminology, and Kenyan state officials and legislation; meanwhile, I’ve never had to cold email Nordiska Afrikainstitutet to answer a terminology question for me. The diary was followed by Ottosson’s translation of Owuor’s story “These Fragments.”

And then the grand finale, the reviews. The author interviews are always interesting, but the downside is that authors can be a lot more interesting than their books. Reviews, on the other hand, are always about the experience of reading a particular personality rather than conveying the personality, making them better indicators of what I might like or not. From this issue I took note of:

  • Rien ne t’appartient, Nathacha Appanah
  • Hardly War, Don Mee Choi
  • The Naked Eye, Yoko Tawada

The pile grows higher faster than I can read through it!

Emil and the Detectives

Both of my parents moved at least part of their childhood libraries into our home where they became the foundation for my collection (and my brother’s, for that matter). Some of these ended up being my own favorites while others simply hung about the house, in various common area bookshelves, forever unclaimed and unread by either me or my brother. Not for any particular reason, either; I think I would just forget about them as soon as I left the room or hallway. Such was the fate of Emil and the Detectives, which I finally sat down to read because sometimes the world is a bummer and you just want to read children’s books from a happier time.

Young Emil from the small town of Neustadt is sent off to visit his grandmother in Berlin with a not insubstantial sum of money, but is robbed en route. A local gang of plucky young boys come to his aid, hijinks ensue, and Emil and the detectives get their man. It’s very wholesome without being cloying, which would explain why there are approximately one million (or just five) movie adaptations of it. It’s cute, it’s a fast read, it’s fun, there’s not much else to say.

For such a slim book, Emil and the Detectives invites a bit of a Wikipedia rabbit hole. The author, Erich Kästner, was the odd duck who was able to remain a vocal critic of the Nazis without being sent to a camp or having to flee the country. While his much more risque and controversial adult novel, Fabian, was the subject of Nazi book burnings, his children’s work was popular enough to keep him more or less out of trouble. Another one of his children’s books, Lisa and Lottie, eventually became the basis for The Parent Trap.

The English translation is another rabbit hole, though a murkier one. It was published thanks to the efforts of legendary children’s book editor May Massee. By all accounts, in addition to her publishing and editing work, Massee also produced the first English translation of Emil and the Detectives, though a later one by Eileen Hall is purportedly the most readily available one in Europe. And yet there’s not much to be found online or in Massee’s biography about any other translation efforts. Was this the only translation she ever produced, a la Alexandra Dick and The Dwarf?

There is lively discussion (read as: this blog post) around the subsequent translations of Emil and the Detectives, and how English translators have approached the question of slang and dialect in the story. My German is several years out of use by this point, though all of this is tempting enough for me to dive back in.

Axplock ur idéhistorien II

I guess the theme so far in 2023 is “reading other people’s books.” I closed out 2022 with The Power of the Dog and then ended up reading Stick (twice! for translation’s sake!) straightaway in 2023, both at the recommendation of a friend. In between those, Axplock ur idéhistorien II arrived on my doorstep—a book I’d promised to babysit for a digital nomad friend who wanted to order it off Adlibris but had no Swedish address to ship to.

And one does not ask me to babysit a book without expecting me to read it.

It’s a tidy little collection spanning just about two hundred years of Western thought, with a focus on the major social ideas that continue to leave their mark on politics today. (This is a polite way to say that a few of the selections are nothing less than noxious.) The selections are abridged when necessary, with context for each selection as well as a short biography of each author:

  • Kant, “Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”
  • Hegel, “Reason in History”
  • Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
  • Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
  • Marx & Engels, “The Communist Manifesto”
  • Gobineau, “An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races”
  • Bremer, Hertha
  • Darwin, On the Origin of Species
  • Mill, “The Subjection of Women”
  • Spencer, The Man Versus the State
  • Nietzsche, On the Geneaology of Morality
  • Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis
  • “Program of the NSDAP”
  • Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism”
  • Beauvoir, The Second Sex
  • Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
  • Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

If you took the above table of contents as a reading list it would probably keep you busy for a year, so collections like these with just The Hits and the central theses are great to have on hand and are much cheaper than, say, a first-year philosophy survey course textbook. (Did I keep mine because I knew I would want to revisit it later? Yes. Have I done so? Actually, also yes.)  I might buy my own copies of both volumes just to have around for reference, who knows.

Do I have a similar English recommendation? Not really. Passion of the Western Mind has a similar, if broader scope, but it’s entirely a secondary source. I had Ten Great Works of Philosophy in my library for years and kind of wish I still had it.

Världen av i går & Amok

It seems I followed much of the rest of the world, or if not the world then just one friend of mine in particular, in reaching for Die Welt von Gestern in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. But since my arbitrary rule of translations is to read German originals in Swedish rather than in English, I had to wait until I came across a Swedish translation (and it never seemed to be available at the library when I remembered to check). Six years later, it appeared in front of me at Söderbokhandeln Hansson & Bruce. I took it with me for vacation reading, and while I was browsing Hubenettes in Östersund I happened to notice Zweig’s novella collection Amok on the shelves. Since they’re the same author and I read them in such close succession, collapsing them into a single blog-thought makes sense.

Amok is not any deliberate assemblage of Zweig’s or time-honored collection that’s seen international release in several languages.  Instead, it’s a collection from Ersatz Förlag, only available in Swedish, featuring “The Royal Game,” “Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman,” “Confusion,” “A Girl and the Weather,” and “Amok.”

The World of Yesterday, on the other hand, is available in several English translations: one from titan among translators Anthea Bell, which seems to be the translation put out by Pushkin Press; one from Plunkett Lake Press attributed to B. W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger; and finally a translation from Robert Boettcher independently published through Amazon.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Zweig doesn’t really discuss his own writing much in Världen av i går, at least from a personal perspective on the process. The only time he addresses the craft of writing more or less head on, he toots his own horn and talks up how one of his strengths as a writer is his ability to murder his darlings and stick to only the most essential elements of a story. After the five stories included in Amok, I have to disagree, but maybe that’s a factor of changing times and literary conventions.

Women are essentially invisible in Zweig’s depiction of Europe in general and of his life in particular. Not surprising for the content or the times, so I’m not exactly mad about it. Nonetheless, it’s worth pointing out that Zweig’s first wife (who only gets two incidental mentions in Världen av i går, one of which is when Zweig is trying to divorce her) undertook a significant chunk of research and administration for him; his second wife (whose only mention is in the same breath as the aforementioned divorce) had originally been his secretary. Amazing how being able to outsource drudgery and life maintenance frees you up to be a highly productive writer!

The same lack of women more or less applies to the stories in Amok, which are all deeply anchored in a first-person perspective from a male narrator. Even “Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman” uses a male narrator to frame the story of the woman in question—a frame that I don’t see much narrative use for. Of course, Amok only contains five novellas out of a substantial body of work; such a limited selection is hardly indicative of an entire body of writing. I just wish there had been more thought on the publisher’s part about which stories to select.

Overall, I was touched by Zweig’s humanity and empathy, which was just as much on show in the above stories as it was in his memoirs. They are all deeply psychological, character-driven narratives rooted in human struggles, suffering, and resilience. But in all honesty, his knack for characterization is actually on better display in Världen av i går than in most of the stories in Amok. Zweig’s sketches of his contemporaries are precise and cutting, unambiguously sympathetic to the person involved but clear-eyed about their flaws or failures. The characters in the stories collected in Amok, on the other hand, are muddier and harder to pin down. I cried at some point in every chapter of Världen av i går, but I shed no tears over any story in Amok.

The reason I was so unmoved by, and ultimately a bit disappointed in, Zweig’s fiction might be the same reason I could lose myself so easily in his memoirs: they are a product of a specific time. Sympathy for an amorous widow scorned by a younger lover, or for a closeted gay English literature professor, might well have been scandalous or at least unusual upon publication in the 1920s, but close to a century later those stories are fairly tame and predictable. So the wheel turns; with any luck, in another hundred years, stories like “I Sexually Identify As an Attack Helicopter” will seem confusing or just banal because we’ll live in a better world where fluid gender identities are a matter of course. While Världen av i går might as well be subtitled “Plus ça change,” stories like “Confusion” with their now-dated and unremarkable plot twists make you realize that things can get better.