I kept see-sawing between being utterly delighted by its absurdity, and being a little irritated by the same. Either way, it was a wonderful read, oneI kept see-sawing between being utterly delighted by its absurdity, and being a little irritated by the same. Either way, it was a wonderful read, one that opened my mind up to the ridiculous, and that gave me an appreciation for the nonsensical, and above all, that left me with an understanding of just how far a writer can go in the direction of complete nonsense before a given reader, as in 'me,' had the slightest objection to it....more
The most remarkable part of this 2013 novel is its first section, "The Great Lindemann," which is without question the progenitor of Kehlmann's extraoThe most remarkable part of this 2013 novel is its first section, "The Great Lindemann," which is without question the progenitor of Kehlmann's extraordinary novel Tyll from 2017. The rest of the novel is pretty good but Kehlmann must have felt the pull of these first pages because Lindemann is Tyll--the same character in different circumstances; the same bullying mocking braggadocio of a confident and misanthropic and wise entertainer onstage, the same helplessness of everyone in the audience. What followed was a pretty-good novel but nothing like the glorious riveting story of these first pages which are almost not a part of the rest of the story at all....more
Werner Herzog feels like kin to me. It feels like I have known him from childhood. I get an "i know exactly what you mean" feeling whenever I watch onWerner Herzog feels like kin to me. It feels like I have known him from childhood. I get an "i know exactly what you mean" feeling whenever I watch one of this films. This gloriously strange little book, a biography-adjacent, not-quite-true exploration of the life of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who defended a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of World War II, made me feel understood. Wacky and indefensible, as feelings go, but even so.
Michael Hofmann's translation is marvelous. I love the way he consistently chooses words like "the gloaming" in his translations, instead of "dusk," or even "twilight," for that matter. His translations are precisely beautiful.
I was transported by Werner Herzog's narration of his own book in English, and recommend the audiobook.
I am pretty much forced to give this little book five stars, because I can read it in German, because it has adorable line drawings throughout, becausI am pretty much forced to give this little book five stars, because I can read it in German, because it has adorable line drawings throughout, because it's charming, because it was signed by the author on Sept 25 1953--Sept 25 being my birthday--and because in 1953 the author signed this book with a fountain pen, in a gorgeous glorious script that nobody writes in any longer.
It seems that, like the painter Emil Nolde (who is on my mind because I just read a retrospective of his work), Manfred Hausmann was Nazi-lite, at first buying into the idea that athletic young aryans were a good thing, and then living out the war years in Germany, not exactly as a collaborator, but certainly as someone who did not get in the way of atrocity, either. This personal history makes me wonder about the extreme simplicity and the complete lack of seriousness or cynicism in Martin, which the author wrote in the immediate postwar years. The story's sweetness and lack of guile, so soon after the horrors of the war, raise questions in me that maybe the author didn't intend, like: why was he writing sweet family stories, while at the same time Böll and others were writing vivid horrific accounts of Germany's postwar destruction, and about how difficult it was for the people to grapple with what they'd just done as a nation?...more
"Here's how it is: The country where I was born no longer exists."
Gorgeous, attentive, precise, subtle, meaningful. Every sentence carried me softly i"Here's how it is: The country where I was born no longer exists."
Gorgeous, attentive, precise, subtle, meaningful. Every sentence carried me softly into a greater understanding of not just one boy's life, but also of the turbulent tragic time through which he and his family lives. Reading this novel took concentration but the payoff was incalculable....more
I love Bernhard Schlink and would read anything by him. I enjoyed reading this novel, but compared with Schlink's past work it struck me as superficiaI love Bernhard Schlink and would read anything by him. I enjoyed reading this novel, but compared with Schlink's past work it struck me as superficial in style, and inconsequential in story. I was reminded of Heinrich Böll's story "Die Blasse Anna," but Böll's story shattered me, whereas Olga mildly engaged me....more
The Magic Mountain isn't just a book to me. It's also a beloved destination.
Is it my favorite book (and favorite destination) of all time? Maybe. I juThe Magic Mountain isn't just a book to me. It's also a beloved destination.
Is it my favorite book (and favorite destination) of all time? Maybe. I just spent 6 weeks listening to the glorious new audiobook narrated by David Rintoul and it was maybe the best 37 hours, 27 minutes I've ever spent....more
The High Rise Diver was fully of interesting imagery and tremendous possibility but I found myself wishing for less incidental detail and more criticaThe High Rise Diver was fully of interesting imagery and tremendous possibility but I found myself wishing for less incidental detail and more critical momentum....more
I received a comb today. What a luxurious and civilized feeling it is, to be able to use one again.
Feldafing is Schochet's brief memoir of his life inI received a comb today. What a luxurious and civilized feeling it is, to be able to use one again.
Feldafing is Schochet's brief memoir of his life in one of the largest post-WWII "displaced persons camps," where survivors of the concentration camps lived, sometimes for years, after they were liberated by the Allies at the end of the war. It's a meticulously remembered account of the chaos immediately following the war, when so many survivors had nowhere left to go home to. It's full of small details and human happenings. It lovingly documents a part of the war that is frequently overlooked in histories, as well as in our collective imaginations about the war and its aftermath.
There were so many reasons camp survivors couldn't go home. How the people Schochet lived through these times, until they found a place to make their home following the war, makes for a sometimes uplifting but mostly unnerving read.
I happened to pick this memoir up at a quarter-a-bag library sale because the cover captivated me. Here it is on GR without a cover picture at all, it's so obscure a book by now. I learned a great deal from this memoir, not only of the post-war European experience but also about the resilience and frailties of human beings in times of great upheaval. A true shame that it's out of print and hard to find....more
This story reminded me of the stories published in the 1957 Modern Library anthology Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space. TheThis story reminded me of the stories published in the 1957 Modern Library anthology Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space. The short stories published in this mid-century anthology are all on the long side for current short-story expectations, and this story would have fit right in. You Should Have Left is longish and linear and ramps up to a spectacular climax, and I enjoyed reading it, in a nostalgic sort of way, as it could have been written in the 1950's exactly as it is written here, which made it a different sort of read entirely from Tyll....more
Tyll is so entertaining that I struggled at first to understand just how deep it is. I'm not sure what it says about contemporary literature, or aboutTyll is so entertaining that I struggled at first to understand just how deep it is. I'm not sure what it says about contemporary literature, or about me, that I needed to consciously banish my cynical mistrust of any book that is so delightful to read.
As I read the novel I thought of Falstaff, Shakespeare's comic-yet-deep repeating character. The character who most reminded me of Falstaff is played by a donkey, a character who appears in many scenes, sometimes for comic value and sometimes for something else entirely.
And now that I've brought it up, I realize that I could write several paragraphs just about the donkey in this novel--how funny the donkey is in a given scene, and then how horrifically the donkey's fate plays out in another scene. Sometimes this donkey has a name, and its name is Origenes. And like so much in Tyll, Kehlmann invites me to think of the donkey's name as just a name, and to read on, or alternatively, to ponder what shimmering potentials are added to my reading if I take time to realize "Origenes" is also the name of an itinerant third-century Christian ascetic whose life and fate were caught up in religious disputes not unlike those raging in this novel.
The donkey's story is threaded throughout this broken, nonlinear novel, and always brings with it some new wonder or terror or sadness or revelation, even though it's a minor character, like Falstaff. And the thing is, it's not just the donkey. Every character in the novel is a kind of itinerant bit player, and every one of them--the miller Claus, the Winter King, the expert in dragonology, the little girl named Martha, Tyll himself--has a marvelous and mysterious story to tell, when it's their time on stage. Kehlmann made them all real for me, sometimes in just a few sentences.
References to Shakespeare plays appear throughout this novel with both historical and thematic resonances. A recurring side-theme is how literature was changing in this period of history that we now call "early-modern." The play Macbeth makes its way into a scene as a way to reference James I's rise to power, and Macbeth's last soliloquy is a good description of how this novel unfurls as you read it:
Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
So here we are. Apparently my second stab at coming to grips with Tyll here on Goodreads is going to consist of a little bit of Shakespeare, a little bit of donkey.
Okay. I should also add that I found a lot of Lutheran-like philosophy playing out in profound ways--over and over again the character Tyll projects a belief that suffering and uncertainty is worth enduring for the hope of living through it, and that evil is worth fighting, for the hope of the good to come. This philosophy is most starkly portrayed in the late chapter "In the Shaft."
Well, I'm just gob-smacked by this novel. Read it....more
I don’t know how Poschmann did it but this novel captures with exquisite perfection the disorienting experience that living in Japan can be, for an atI don’t know how Poschmann did it but this novel captures with exquisite perfection the disorienting experience that living in Japan can be, for an attentive non-Japanese person who comes to Japan with no agenda and with some time to look around.
There is such an extreme level of discernment here in this novel...every scene nails it. I would guess most people who have not spent a lot of time in Japan—enough for instance to know about the deeply strange and almost obligatory love every Japanese person professes to feel about Matsushima—would feel like this book is exaggerated satire, when actually it just is the way Japan IS.
I’m kind of in awe and a little woozy from the experience of having just finished this excellent and very funny book, so maybe I will come back and try to be more coherent in my review in a few days. I lived in Japan for years and this novel hit me hard with a lovely nostalgia for a place I still love so its impossible for me to know how anyone else without this experience will react to it. ...more
July 2023 note: I complained about the prose in my original review when I read it in English. Stupid me. I'm listening to the audiobook in German now July 2023 note: I complained about the prose in my original review when I read it in English. Stupid me. I'm listening to the audiobook in German now and it's clear and stark and beautifully realized by Jens Harzer. More to come. Original review below.
Without a doubt the prose in this translated novel goes clunkety-clunk and sometimes stops altogether in a flurry of authorial interference on the page, written to make sure that I as a reader know what to think. But once i put all these objections in a box, what I'm left with is an extraordinary work, to be sure more historical artifact than novel, that captures a culture at the tipping point of losing its soul.
The metaphorical layers are perfect to the historic moment. It might at first feel like a blunt tool to use Goethe's play Faust, written in part as an Enlightenment manifesto, as a metaphor for Nazism's rise. But Mann isn't going for subtle, here. This book feels driven by heartbreak and urgency.
So while I didn't love the execution, and may actually feel I'll like the movie better once I see it, I loved it for its passionate conviction and its truth-saying....more
The book is an account of a horrific chain of events that in fact happened to the author, who survived Dachau.
But it is also unabashedly subjective: The book is an account of a horrific chain of events that in fact happened to the author, who survived Dachau.
But it is also unabashedly subjective: part-memoir, part fiction, a mix of first- and third-person accounts, and in no way trying to hold itself up as 'the truth,' and it's told in a non-linear, fractured manner, in four broken parts where even the protagonist/author's name is different from one section to the next.
I realize that what I just wrote contradicts itself. If something "in fact happened," then it's not "subjective," or usually it isn't, anyway.
In fact, the author contradicts herself many times about what is true and not-true, right here in the text:
There is a fact that I evaded. By so often saying that i had been deported to Dachau, I ended up believing it. But it's not true. My companions were transferred to that Lager. Not me. I was repatriated.
As I read this book I began to think about how different it was from the shaped memory of Night by Elie Wiesel, a book in which each scene is written novelistically; a book that Wiesel called his true experience.
Wiesel's truth is presented in a more polished way for the reader than Deviation, though. Wiesel's people die in well-written ways, with the tools of fiction vivifying each scene, as in this passage about three Jews who are hanged:
Both adults were already dead. The noose had choked them at once. Instantly they expired. Their extended tongues were red as fire. Only the slight Jewish child with the lost dreamy eyes was still alive. His body weighed too little. Was too light. The noose didn't catch. The slow death of the little meshoresl took thirty-five minutes. And we saw him wobbling, swaying, on the rope, with his bluish-red tongue extended, with a prayer on his grey-white lips, a prayer to God...When we saw him like that, the hanged child, many of us didn't want to, couldn't keep from crying.
In Deviation there is no such scene-building, no use of metaphor, and very little reportage of how witnesses felt to see others brutalized and killed. There is a flatness in the storytelling, frequently to the point where I felt detached from the brutalizing deaths of victims portrayed. It could be that this detachment is closer to the "truth" of what survivors felt when they witnessed so much senseless death all around them. It could be that Wiesel's emotionally vivid scene-building where survivors cry and pray to God gives readers solace, though, and reminds readers of the truth that human lives were lost, and in that way Night provides another kind of truth--truth with a bit of hope in it, maybe.
In Deviation people come and go, events seem utterly random, and what is significant and what is meaningless blend together. By consistently calling attention to itself as subjective, and by refusing to mold itself into a narrative or to use Bildungsroman structural elements, it remains deeply unsatisfying in some ways. It's a lot of work to read this book. Without fictional and scenic props to pull me along, it could be tedious. I find Night much more heart-rending because it's full of the tools of fiction to drive its messages into our hearts. But D'Eramo's kind of storytelling offers an alternative that might bring us closer to the truth of an author's own experience....more
I read it in German. I don't know why. But it was fun and I learned a lot of names for animals that don't come up much in adult fiction. I feel very sI read it in German. I don't know why. But it was fun and I learned a lot of names for animals that don't come up much in adult fiction. I feel very stupid though that I had to look up what a "Dachs" was, even though I had a "Dachshund" when I was a kid. I feel bad that until now I didn't know that my amazing dog was bred for such a specific and dangerous purpose. In this little book the Dachs is a gentle fellow but I imagine a Dachs trapped in his den by a Dachshund would be another thing altogether....more
Whenever I read a book in its original German I recall Simon Armitage's introduction to his magnificent translation of Sir Gawain and the Green KnightWhenever I read a book in its original German I recall Simon Armitage's introduction to his magnificent translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where Armitage wrote: "it is as if the poem is lying beneath a thin coat of ice, tantalisingly near yet frustratingly blurred." My German comprehension is not complete unless I read slow, and I need to stop completely now and then to suss out a sentence. But for this book I wanted to read steady. I wanted to encounter this long essay of a book in a way that was free of interruption. I discovered far more that was tantalizingly near than what was frustrating.
The whole of this book fascinates me. Both the book and its author seem ready to drop from our collective memory. Even in Germany the latest reprint on Amazon.de has just one review--someone wrote to report that he needs to keep buying it for his 88 year old mom, who loves it and keeps giving it away to her friends.
Onto the book itself, which is a melancholy mix of humor and wisdom and sadness.
It begins with a long anecdote about an Englishman in the news who left a note that he had committed suicide because he felt oppressed by the boredom of everyday life--he had decided to hang himself, he said in his note, because it had become too stupid and too boring to put on the clothes every morning that he had taken off the night before. During the last forty-five years of his life he calculated he had performed these actions 6425 times and could not see any point in continuing to do so.
It seems a grim way to begin, but then the essay soars in unexpected ways--or maybe entirely expected ways given that it was written in the rubble of WWII--to explore how fragile normalcy is. That normal boring lives can open at any moment and hurl us into chaos where the search for the firm ground of our existence is our most fragile hope. Between the superficially normal and the helplessly chaotic, human life moves.
This book is about a lot of other things. Including Uncle Hinrich's chicken farm. It reminded me a good deal of the best of Erich Kästner, another German author whose oeuvre spanned from children's books to meditative essays, and who lived longer than Bürgel did, and who had the good fortune of being discovered by Hollywood and his books made into films before he died....more
This novella is about a man who is unexpectedly late for a dinner that is made in his honor, and to tell you the truth I know this guy. In fact, I wasThis novella is about a man who is unexpectedly late for a dinner that is made in his honor, and to tell you the truth I know this guy. In fact, I was once married to this guy. And you might also know this guy, as a matter of fact, if you have ever been with someone for whom everything is perfect; but it's perfect only because you are working so damn hard to make sure nothing ever upsets him, because if he gets upset it's going to be your fault, obviously, and bad things will happen, and they will also be your fault. And as you read The Mussel Feast you will marvel at how completely Birgit Vanderbeke has captured this guy we both know, and you might, like me, be happily surprised by what happens next....more
Waldemar Bonsels' Maya the Bee is full of story and feeling, and it also happens to be beautifully written, with the vocabulary and diction and wonderWaldemar Bonsels' Maya the Bee is full of story and feeling, and it also happens to be beautifully written, with the vocabulary and diction and wonder of other great children's books of this era--this is a book that rivals The Wizard of Oz, or Wind in the Willows.
In addition to its lush diction--0ne beautifully written sentence after another--this novel is different from modern children's books in the way it neither shirks from nor exploits violent happenings. Characters are mostly insects; throughout the book some die, or are subject to grave danger. Bad things happen and those who survive carry on. It's a look at life when the young deaths of innocents wasn't terribly uncommon. Before penicillin or cures for childhood diseases were discovered. I read this first as a child, a copy in my grandmother's house, and reading again this time I remembered so vividly the scenes when insect lives are cut short. They didn't scare me as a child--they did make me feel wiser and more ready for this business of growing up, though.
The German version is lovely. The English translation is also out of copyright and it is very good, too, available for free online. There are even illustrated versions on the Gutenberg project. You owe it to yourself to read it, and then, to read it with your children....more
I understand why Feuchtwanger isn’t as widely read or even as well-known these days as some of his contemporaries but this book is its own kind of masI understand why Feuchtwanger isn’t as widely read or even as well-known these days as some of his contemporaries but this book is its own kind of masterpiece. In contrast with other novels set in Germany in the era of National Socialism, The Oppenheimers captures the intellectual richness of German culture prior to Hitler’s rise, and how completely Nazism perverted it. There is quite a bit of space devoted to intellectual and philosophical and historical and moral frameworks that the characters in the novel live by and depend on to save them. A belief in culture, in moral goodness. It’s heartbreaking in a different way to read the story of a family that is completely assimilated and whose Jewishness is almost incidental to their identity as Germans—who are in every sense the best of German culture—try to comprehend and cope with and ultimately be destroyed by a world that no longer recognizes them as German, or even human....more
This memoir surprised me so much. It mapped out a new definition of "honest" for me. Most of the time reviewers call a memoir "honest" when it tells eThis memoir surprised me so much. It mapped out a new definition of "honest" for me. Most of the time reviewers call a memoir "honest" when it tells everything, every tiny excruciating detail of what (usually bad) thing happened to the memoirist. This writing is honest because of its restraint. It's honest for the way Geiger elucidates his own frequent failings--failing to always be patient with a father with Alzheimers, for example--as being normal, and human. He doesn't blame himself, or defend himself, either. He just records, with loving compassion, what happened between him and his father in his father's last years.
Extraordinary also for the way Geiger interweaves scenes from his father's childhood and early youth and how his father's experiences during the war years changed him for life. All of this is presented with great love that is never sentimental or false. Somehow too Geiger has written a book about loss that ends up being a celebration of humanity. ...more
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