I’ll talk about this book in terms of its three major themes. ‘Homecoming’ is one – specifically a man returning home to his wife and family after a lI’ll talk about this book in terms of its three major themes. ‘Homecoming’ is one – specifically a man returning home to his wife and family after a long absence to find – what? Wife gone? His wife with another man? His wife surrounded by suitors? Obviously the classic homecoming is that in the Odyssey: Odysseus comes home to Penelope. References to that homecoming are made a dozen times in this story.
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Justice is a second theme. The author was a German judge and a professor of law and philosophy, so one theme is ‘justice.’ What is it and how do we deal with it? So we get some discussions, often in dialog, ranging from the cosmic aspects to the mundane: when we feed ducks, should we aim some pieces of bread at the smaller ones, struggling to get anything?
A third theme is a boy’s search for who his father was. His mother says his father is dead and she goes into a frenzy when he asks any questions about him. His grandparents (his father’s parents) also believe their son is dead. But is he? Will this search for who his father was turn into an actual search for his father?
The story starts out as a coming-of-age story telling us of the delights of a young boy staying each summer with his grandparents. The grandparents run a small press that publishes a small run of books by local authors. The partial proof pages of one novel fascinate the boy. So we get bits and pieces of a homecoming story when a WW II vet returns home to find his wife with another man. What happens then?
After his grandparents’ deaths, the narrator, now a young man (the book is in the first person) is still obsessed with finding out the ending to the story. So a lot of the early story touches on the search for this book. This is in the days before the internet, so he goes to libraries and bookstores and writes letters searching for the book.
The main character takes up with a woman and experiences his own twist on a homecoming. (view spoiler)[ She did not tell him she was married, so we are treated to the results of that homecoming when her husband returns months later from an overseas assignment. (hide spoiler)] Near the end of the story, he goes overseas for a long period of time. The tables are turned and he wonders what awaits him at his homecoming.
Although it’s not a long book (260 pages) it dragged a bit and I see in a review from one of my GR friends that he gave up after 140 pages. I liked much of it but I had two problems with the ending. One I’ll put in a spoiler. But here’s the first one: the ending to me seemed disconnected from the themes of the book. It made me feel that I didn’t get it, or perhaps I missed something?
Secondly I felt the ending was unrealistic. I know fiction is fiction but still …(view spoiler)[ It ends with a rogue professor putting his students through a year-end ‘seminar’ where they feel they are in a life-threatening situation. The professor does this every year. No university would allow this, even then, and this was supposed to have taken place in the USA. (hide spoiler)] So, I gave it a ‘3’ and I note that GR readers have rated it a 3.2 which is very low.
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The author (1944- ) is best known for his novel The Reader, which the GR blurb tells us The Reader was the first German book to reach the number one position on the New York Times bestseller list.
Top painting: Penelope and her suitors by Pinturicchio circa 1500 on Wikimedia The author from new-books-in-german.com...more
A horror/psycho-thriller by ‘Germany’s Stephen King.’ [Edited 1/28/23]
Our main character, Leon, is a young married man who suffered from insomnia and A horror/psycho-thriller by ‘Germany’s Stephen King.’ [Edited 1/28/23]
Our main character, Leon, is a young married man who suffered from insomnia and sleepwalking as a kid. Years ago he had an incident of violence while sleepwalking and had psychiatric treatment for his condition. Now, years later - is it back?
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He and his wife are into BDSM. This morning his wife left him – she even had a tooth missing! He has no memory of how this could have happened. But that’s the point of his sleepwalking – he does all kinds of things in his sleep and has no recollection of what he did. He keeps calling and texting his wife, but no response.
So here’s the fascinating, perhaps unique, premise of this book: Leon lives in three different worlds – three different realities – the everyday real world; a dream world, and a sleepwalking world. The three worlds are almost entirely disconnected from each other in his mind.
So, when something happens, what world is he in? There are times when he wakes up and wonders: did my wife really leave me with a tooth missing or did I dream that? Or did I really do that to her? Then he looks around and sees her stuff is gone, so yes, she left. Unless he is dreaming all this. And, just to keep him and the reader on our toes, there are times he dreams he did things while sleepwalking!
That’s just the start. He finds out he lives in an apartment house designed by a weird architect with secret passageways and tunnels connecting floors and rooms, and two-way mirrors that look into the apartments. And right there, down in a dank basement tunnel, is his wife’s cellphone with all his texts and messages on it! So where is she? What’s going on? Or is this all just a nightmare? He rigs up a camera to record what goes on when he falls asleep. He and we see some amazing stuff.
So, certainly a good story with a complex plot. To fully follow all the twists and turns you’d have to read it, or re-read it, with a 3-color highlighter and mark the passages: this must be a dream; this must be real; this must be sleepwalking.
It’s horror but we could still call it a fun read; there’s limited gore and the BDSM stuff is relatively tame.
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Sebastian Fitzek (b. 1971) has written 20 or so horror or psycho-thriller books that have sold more than 13 million copies. One site says he is Germany’s best-selling author.
Top photo from choni23.deviantart.com The author from alexandraamor.com...more
Have you ever heard the name Hiroo Onoda? This is a fictionalized story based on Onoda’s 29 years of hiding in the mountainous jungle on Lubang IslandHave you ever heard the name Hiroo Onoda? This is a fictionalized story based on Onoda’s 29 years of hiding in the mountainous jungle on Lubang Island in the Philippines, thinking that Japan was still fighting WW II. Onoda and five men were left behind by retreating Japanese forces in 1944.
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Spoilers follow:
Of the five men under Onoda’s command some shortly fled but two remained with him. One surrendered after five years but the second was his comrade for many years until shot in an ambush by Filipino soldiers.
So this short book is really an action-adventure story of how these men, and eventually, Onoda by himself, survived in the jungle for 29 years. It's an amazing feat given that this is a small island (smaller than either Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket). Settlements surround the edge of the island and Filipino soldiers knew they were out there. Many times the Filipino soldiers dropped leaflets or flew over the jungle with loudspeakers announcing an amnesty for the Japanese men. But not only did Onoda refuse to believe that Japan had lost, he also knew that since he and his men had killed villagers over the years during their raids for food, he was skeptical about accepting these offers that ‘all was forgiven.’
Their belief that the war was still on is confirmed by flights of American airplanes for long periods of times over various years – the Korean and Vietnam Wars.
They survived on stolen food from outlying villagers. Often they would fire shots to scare everyone away, and they would go in and steal rice and other staples. They also killed farm animals and smoked the meat to preserve it, but they could only have fires during the rainy season or in dense fog because otherwise the smoke would give away their location.
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The men were constantly on the move, building and abandoning crude huts. Every sign of civilization that blew in - a newspaper, a pornographic magazine, a piece of chocolate bar – was assumed to be a trap. Sometimes they were right, because the last man, his last comrade, was shot in an ambush by Filipino soldiers.
Eventually in 1974 a Japanese student camped out in woods on the island until he lured Onoda out and earned his confidence. The student returned with Onoda’s former commanding officer -now an ancient man - who ordered him to surrender.
This amnesty was granted by the Philippine dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, largely because there was good publicity in it. Many pictures were taken and the surrender of Onoda’s sword was re-enacted with Marcos for the benefit of TV cameras. Marcos said that Onoda should be judged by standards of actions during wartime, so I guess everything he and his men did was okay, even though they at times shot and killed innocent villagers.
So all was forgiven and Onoda became a Japanese celebrity, eventually marrying and moving to Brazil where his brother owned a farm. Onoda, 22 years old when he began his jungle sojourn, was 51 when he surrendered. He was 92 when he died in 2014.
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As an action-adventure story I would give this book a ‘4.’ It’s a survivalist story with all the fascination of Robinson Crusoe. However the beginning and ending of the book seemed hastily thrown together and the story never really touches on Onoda's feelings about all this in any depth.
The strongest impression that comes across is the sense of a time warp – what is past, present or future in 29 years in the jungle constantly on the alert and hiding out? Just one example of how these feelings are lacking is shown in a single sentence related to the villagers that were killed. All that Herzog has to say about that is: “But the matter of those he had killed among the population never quite went away.” We learn nothing about what the real or even the fictional Onoda thinks of the matter. So, I rounded my rating down to a ‘3.’
The author of this book, Werner Herzog (b. 1942), is a German film maker. This may be his first novel. All his other books seem to be autobiographical stories related to his filmmaking. The author befriended Onoda on a trip to Japan and interviewed him about his time in the jungle, although again, he states that this book is a fictionalized story based in reality.
Top photo of Onoda from historydaily.org Map of Lubang Island from moken.ca Onoda in his later years from miro.medium.com ...more
I read this book thinking it was by an obscure German author. Nor did I realize it was horror. Then I found out that Seb[Edited for spoilers 10/16/23]
I read this book thinking it was by an obscure German author. Nor did I realize it was horror. Then I found out that Sebastian Fitzek is basically Germany’s Stephen King! His 20-or-so books have sold more than 13 million copies and one site says he is Germany’s best-selling author.
I say horror but a better label for this book is terror or psycho-thriller. There’s a serial killer on the loose in Berlin. He rapes escort women in fancy hotels, shaves their hair as a trophy, and then kills them. The killings aren't violent. (view spoiler)[ He injects a drug. (hide spoiler)]
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The killer attacks our main character, a 30-ish woman psychologist, who is staying in a hotel while making a presentation at a psychology conference. She survives but no one, including the police, her husband or her best friends really believe she was attacked.
Why does no one believe her? She’s not a call girl. There’s no evidence of a rape. She says she was in a room number that doesn’t exist, nor does her description of the room décor match that of the hotel. She was only injected with a small amount of the drug – a drug she has access to as a psychologist. She has a history of her own psychological imaginings as a young girl – a man who hid in her closet and threatened to kill her parents - with a syringe. Plus it turns out she lied about part of the psychology presentation she made – causing a tempest in that teapot.
Basically they don’t believe her because she wasn’t killed. THAT would give her the hard evidence she needs to convince everyone it really happened! (view spoiler)[ The trauma of the attack incapacitates her and she becomes housebound. (hide spoiler)]
We get a heavy dose of the ‘psycho’ in this psycho-thriller. Not only is the main character a psychologist with a history of psychological problems, but her husband is a criminal profiler for the Berlin police. And with a serial killer on the loose in town, guess what case is his top priority? Her best friend is a criminal lawyer, specializing in criminal psych cases, an older gay man she has known all her life, a friend of her parents.
It's a complex plot but we don’t get lost in it. In the second half of the book, the story unfolds in a series of chapters alternating between the events (“six weeks earlier” etc.) as the woman discusses everything with her best friend, the psychologist. (view spoiler)[ She's now institutionalized. (hide spoiler)]
Every strange doing gets satisfactorily resolved. And there are a lot: switched drugs, a poisoned dog, a misdirected package, a psychotic neighbor, body parts in a shed, and much more.
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If you like horror and psycho-thrillers and you have not previously read this author (b. 1971) I encourage you to do so. All of his books appear to be available in English and all are rated on GR around ‘4’ or higher – that’s excellent as far as ratings go. Many of his books have been made into German horror films and his stuff has even been incorporated into board games and computer games.
Top photo - a still from a German movie, The Child, based on another of the author's books The author from radiodayseurope.com...more
The author grew up German in Switzerland and moved to Berlin in his youth. His older brother, a famous stage designer for theaters, introduced him to The author grew up German in Switzerland and moved to Berlin in his youth. His older brother, a famous stage designer for theaters, introduced him to high society and artists. None of these stories touch on those living on the other side of the tracks.
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The main theme is the vibrancy of Berlin roughly from 1910-1920. The author loved his city and he considered it the cultural capital of the world. The tone of his upbeat essays show that love of the city as do quite a few other works I’ve read paying homage to other cities: many of Patrick Modiano’s stories set in Paris; E. M. Forster’s Howards End on London; Buenos Aires in Tomas Martinez’s The Tango Singer, and Barcelona in Eduardo Mendoza’s City of Marvels.
The stories are more essays than short stories. Of the 40 or so stories, really only a half dozen might be thought of as short stories with any kind of plot. They read as if they were to be published in newspapers; and many were “feuilletons” I gather – literary essays offered as supplements to news in big city papers.
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So what are the stories about? Most are about the simple pleasures of the city: the market, the delightful chaos of the train station, the thrill of riding the electric tram, Sunday in the park, having a sandwich and beer at stand-up café, watching a building on fire. Several are about the theater and ballet and the performance of particular actors, actresses and dancers of the time.
Here’s a sample of his writing style from “The Park”:
“I go in, dry, fallen leaves fly and swirl and sweep and tumble toward me. This is exceptionally amusing and at the same time contemplative; the lively is always more contemplative than what is dead and sad. Park air welcomes me; the many thousand green leaves of the lofty trees are lips that wish me good morning: So you’re up already too? Indeed, yes, I’m surprised myself. A park like this resembles a large, silent, Isolated room. In fact it’s always Sunday in a park, by the way, for it’s always a bit melancholy, and the melancholy stirs up vivid memories of home, and Sunday is something that only ever existed at home, where you were a child. Sundays have something parental and childish about them.”
A few essays qualify almost as short stories. And several of these have the same theme: an elderly wealthy woman (apparently one of his real-life landladies) who is stingy, friendless, childless, despised by her relatives, and goes around dressed in rags. Another, “The Little Berliner,” is written in the first person about a young girl who lives in Berlin with her father and occasionally goes to Venice to visit her mother.
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A couple of stories touch on the author’s personal life (1878-1956). He became a well-known writer in his time (Wiki says his work was admired by, and an influence on, Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Stefan Zweig and others. His personal outlook on life, like his stories, is amazingly upbeat and full of wonderment at life. Yet, despite his fame, he lived his entire life on the edge of poverty, relying at times on support from his brother. And despite his upbeat outlook on life he ended up in a mental asylum.
I enjoyed the stories and all the local color of Berlin at the start of the twentieth century.
Top painting: "Nach Natur," a watercolor of Robert Walser as Karl Moor, a character in Walser’s favorite play, The Robbers by Friedrich Schiller. The watercolor is by Robert's brother Karl Walser. From 50watts.com Berlin in 1900 from rijksmuseum.nl The author from dw.com
This book is widely regarded as a classic. The author spent twenty years writing it. There are three volumes - of which this review is of volume one, This book is widely regarded as a classic. The author spent twenty years writing it. There are three volumes - of which this review is of volume one, the only one that is widely read.
There are a variety of characters but little plot. The main character is 32-year-old mathematician who is actually unemployed. Like the author, Ulrich was previously a military officer and an engineer and then an unpaid professor. Wiki says his indifference to life has brought him to the state of being "a man without qualities"
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Ulrich’s father thinks he should find some usefulness to his life, so the father uses his political influence to get his son a position on a national committee that is looking to celebrate shortly (in 1918) seventy years of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph's reign. “What is true patriotism, true progress, the true Austria?” There’s much talk of blending “Austrian culture with Prussian intellectual discipline.” It’s also an opportunity for the Vienna intellectual crowd to flag its superiority over Germany, “…for the European spirit to recognize Austria as its true home!” The meetings and the give and take on this large committee (20 or more people) give the author a chance to lampoon what he saw as the decay of moral values and the silliness of nationalism.
There are a few odd characters who provide interest in the story. One is a female distant cousin of Ulrich who opens her home to host the committee meetings and, in effect, creates a salon. There’s a Prussian, “a crazy rich Jew,” who is clearly the dominant intellectual mover on the committee. This character is also accompanied by a young African man whom he brings with him almost as a ‘curiosity.’ And then there is Moosbrugger, a murderer and rapist in the news who has been convicted and condemned for the murder of a prostitute. Ulrich constantly wonders if Moosbrugger can be held responsible for his actions. Ulrich brings this topic up for discussion at the most inopportune times, sometimes making people wonder about Ulrich’s sanity.
The real value of a book like this is its philosophical insight and intellectual nuggets on essentially every page. A few examples:
“It is a fundamental characteristic of civilization that a man most profoundly mistrusts those living outside his own milieu, so that not only does the Teuton regard the Jew as an incomprehensible and inferior being , but the football-player likewise so regards the man who pays the piano.”
[With science] “We have gained in terms of reality and lost in terms of the dream.”
“But in science it happens every few years that something up to then was held to be error suddenly revolutionizes all views or that an unobtrusive, despised idea becomes the ruler over a new realm of ideas; and such occurrences are not mere upheavals but lead up into the heights like Jacob’s ladder.”
“At times he felt just as though he had been born with a gift to which at present there was no function.”
“Philosophers are violent and aggressive persons who, having no army at their disposal, bring the world into subjection to themselves by locking it up into a system.”
“…a man who does great things usually does not know why. As Cromwell said: ‘A man never rises so high as when he does not know where he is going.’”
“…fame, such as is acquired by intellectual achievements, melts away with remarkable rapidity as soon as one associates with those to whom it attaches…”
“Accordingly civilization meant, for her, everything that her mind could not cope with. And hence too it had for a long time meant, first and foremost, her husband.”
“A great scientist, when he was once asked how he managed to hit upon so much that was new, replied: ‘By keeping on thinking about it.’ And indeed it may safely be said that unexpected inspirations are produced by no other means than the expectation of them.”
“He recollected Voltaire’s dictum that people use words only in order to conceal their thoughts and make use of thoughts only in order to justify their acts of injustice.”
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This is not a light read, so it’s something you might read over a week or longer. As for a rating, It’s kind of a 4 but I’ll round up to 5 for its obvious intellectual ‘meat.’
Painting of a Vienna coffeehouse: The Café Griensteidl in Vienna, watercolor by Reinhold Voelkel, 1896. Photo by Getty. nu.aeon.co/images Austrian stamp honoring the author from previews.123rf.com/images ...more
A story of poverty, despair and disillusioned lives. (Another ‘light’ read, LOL.) A young woman, a post office clerk in Austria, has lived in poverty A story of poverty, despair and disillusioned lives. (Another ‘light’ read, LOL.) A young woman, a post office clerk in Austria, has lived in poverty supporting her mother most of her life. She was born in 1898 and thus in her teens went through the deprivations of WW I. “The war stole her decade of youth.” Her small village offers no marriage prospects.
Suddenly a wealthy aunt and uncle from the United States invite her to visit with them on vacation in the Swiss Alps. For a little more than one week, the young woman enters a whirlpool of an unimaginable life. Her aunt buys her clothes and cosmetics and re-styles her hair – not realizing she spent an amount equal to her niece’s annual salary. Hotels, dancing, gambling, restaurants, room service and maids, fast cars (and petting with the wealthy men in them). Her uncle shares a single gambling bet with her, not realizing he has given her another half of her annual salary. It’s TOO much. I won’t give a spoiler here but it all ends abruptly and she goes back to her village and her job. Her mother soon dies.
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She plunges into despair at her again-empty life. She turns into a petty tyrant at the post office, snapping at customers and making them strictly follow all the stupid bureaucratic rules. She has a sister in Vienna, an hour’s train ride away, and here she finally meets her soulmate - an old army buddy of her brother-in-law. The man she meets is equally poverty-stricken and disillusioned with life because he has crippled hands from the war but no disability pension. Jobs where you don’t need to use your hands are hard to come by as the depression is looming. Then he loses that job and he’s worried about turning into a beggar on the streets.
They both come to believe in the “horrible purposelessness of life:” “Every morning when I go to work I see people coming out of their front doors, underslept, cheerless, their faces blank, see them going to work that they haven’t chosen and have no love for and that means nothing to them, and then again in the evening I see them in the streetcars on their way back, their expressions leaden, their feet leaden, all of them exhausted for no good reason, or some reason they don’t understand.”
They meet weekly in Vienna but have no money to really enjoy themselves. They can’t even afford a hotel to be intimate – they tried a flophouse and she is terrified to go back after it was raided by the police looking for prostitutes. They are so disillusioned that he talks her into committing suicide with him. (He has a pistol from the war.)
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This incident about joint suicide eerily foreshadows the way the author will die. He and his second wife killed themselves with poison in exile in Brazil in 1942. Zweig fled Austria as he was Jewish.
But once you’re open to suicide, other unthinkable possibilities occur to you. (view spoiler)[ The man comes to realize from conversations with the woman that at the end of the month, her post office has enough cash on hand to last them for two or three years. He writes out an elaborately detailed written plan about how she will steal the money, cover their tracks, and they will escape to Paris and maybe later move to America. She agrees. Will it happen? Will it all work out? (hide spoiler)]
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There's good writing:
“Someone who’s on top of the world isn’t much of an observer: happy people are poor psychologists. But someone who’s troubled about something is on the alert. The perceived threat sharpens his senses – he takes in more than he usually does.”
“ ‘No, no,’ Christine says, or rather her lips say it, the way a patient going under anesthesia might continue counting after losing consciousness.”
Zweig (1881-1942) was a prolific author with 25 or so books. Only a few, such as Post Office Girl, are full novels – many are novellas and collections of short stories. He was at one time considered the most translated author in the world.
Top photo: Park Hotel in Vitznau, Switzerland from edge.media.datahc.com
Middle photo: Vienna in the early 1900’s from cliomuse.com
Photo of the author and his second wife, Lotte from Flickr, Creative Commons
A short review because there are 3,000+ others! [Edited 1/30/23]
A well-established older German man visits Venice and falls in love with a 14-year-oldA short review because there are 3,000+ others! [Edited 1/30/23]
A well-established older German man visits Venice and falls in love with a 14-year-old boy on the beach. Here is a key passage very early in the novella (about 75 pages) that illustrates the author’s writing style:
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“He [the 14-year old Polish boy] entered through the glass doors and passed diagonally across the room to his sisters at their table. He walked with extraordinary grace – the carriage of the body, the action of the knee, the way he set his foot down in its white shoe – it was all so light, it was at once dainty and proud, it wore an added charm in the childish shyness which made him twice turn his head as he crossed the room, made him give a quick glance and then drop his eyes. He took his seat, with a smile and a murmured word in his soft and blurry tongue; and Aschenbach, sitting so that he could see him in profile, was astonished anew, yes, startled, at the godlike beauty of the human being. The lad had on a light sailor suit of blue and white striped cotton, with a red silk breast-knot and a simple white standing collar round the neck – a not very elegant effect – yet above this collar the head was poised like a flower, an incomparable loveliness. It was the head of Eros, with the yellowish bloom of Parian marble, with fine serious brows, and dusky clustering ringlets standing out in soft plenteousness over temples and ears.”
The older man constantly monitors the boy in the hotel dining room and at the beach and eventually starts stalking the boy as he travels through Venice with his family.
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But a plague is also stalking Venice. He considers leaving the city because of the 'miasma' but decides to stay because of the boy – a bad decision.
Mann uses many classical references: in just a few pages Achelous, Phaedrus, Eros, Cleitos, Cephalus, Orion, Poseidon, Pan and others are mentioned.
Truly a classic – from 1911. I first read it many years ago.
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Mann (1875-1955) was a German writer who won the 1929 Noble Prize. He fled Germany for Switzerland and then the USA, not because he was Jewish, but because he opposed Hitler’s ideology and he knew his sexually-charged writings wouldn't help. He lived in the US (Princeton and then Los Angles) from 1939 to 1952 and became a US citizen. However he was hounded by the McCarthyites as a ‘communist’ and went back to live his final years in Switzerland. I read The Magician, Colm Toibin's fictionalized biography of Mann, and thought it was a great book.The Magician
Top photo from c.pxhere.com Middle photo from anamericaninrome.com Photo of the author from the Thomas Mann archives at nebis.ch...more
A book by the German author who won the 1999 Nobel prize, best known for his novel The Tin Drum. The story is[Revised, spoilers hidden, typos 3/10/23]
A book by the German author who won the 1999 Nobel prize, best known for his novel The Tin Drum. The story is set during World War II in Danzig, a free city on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Germany until the Nazis took it over. Today it is Gdansk, Poland.
There are two main characters, two boys of early high school age, the only two Catholics who hang out with a group of ten or so Lutheran boys and occasionally girls. In summer they swim out daily to their hangout – a half-sunken Polish minesweeper in the harbor. One main character is the narrator who tells the story of the real main character and his radical changes over time, which become the main theme of the book.
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At first the main character is shy and awkward. Today we’d call him a geek or a dork. The other boys avoid him and make fun of him. He says he wants to be a professional clown. He’s tall and gangly with big ears and, at first, can’t even swim. (His huge Adam’s apple is a joke in the title of the book.) Since they often swim naked he’s also admired for the size of his, let’s say, his ‘dangling participle.’
But once they teach him how to swim he becomes the best swimmer and diver among them. He’s the only one who can dive underwater into the ship’s hold. Every day he brings up medals, pictures, equipment, tools, and even cans of food from the sunken part of the vessels. He transforms into a hero and the kids start calling him "The Great Mahlke.”
Both of the Catholic boys are very religious but in different ways. The narrator is a daily altar boy. 'The Great' is excessively devout in taking communion but even his priest worries about his Mariolatry. The Great says “Of course I don’t believe in God. He’s just a swindle to stultify the people. The only thing I believe in is the Virgin Mary. That’s why I’m never going to get married,”
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The Great lives in a household of females – his mother and her female relatives. His father died before the war in a work accident. More transformations take place. He seems to disparage the Nazi war effort, listlessly singing patriotic songs, (view spoiler)[ and having the audacity to steal a medal from a visiting war hero speaking at their school. (hide spoiler)] Yet as soon as he is old enough he suddenly runs off to enlist in the army. He becomes a war hero, (view spoiler)[ recognized for shooting so many enemy tanks, which he writes home bragging about. He also acquires a reputation as a lady’s man, going after officers’ wives while men are at the front. (hide spoiler)]
He transforms again. Home on leave he suddenly announces he’s going AWOL and hides out on the boat with the help of his friend. To me, I did not get a good sense of what all these transformations were about or why they occurred. A GR friend, Kalkwiese, in a comment below, wrote that it is about Mahlke over-compensating for his appearance and lack of a father - a story of false heroism. That makes sense.
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So a bit strange but the story moved along and kept my interest. It’s fairly short, less than 200 pages. We get snippets of ships and naval battle statistics. I thought it was a worthwhile read - 3.5 but I rounded down to a '3.'
Top photo Gdansk today from pcdn.co Danzig after bombings from danzigfreestate.org Photo of the author (1927-2015) from haaretz.com/polopoly...more
I liked this short book for its imaginative plot and its cynical humor. It’s a bit of a wild ride. One of the two main characters is the devil. He’s iI liked this short book for its imaginative plot and its cynical humor. It’s a bit of a wild ride. One of the two main characters is the devil. He’s in the form of a good-looking 30-year old guy called Nagy who holds jobs like a security guard in a department store and as a magician. (His magician stage name gives us the title of the book.)
The devil is bored. He’s tired of evil. “Every day you can hear in the news about torturers who are much more imaginative than me.” He wants to be affectionate toward someone for a change. “…I had the feeling the human race didn’t really need me any more, they could manage quite well on their own.”
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Of all people, he falls in love with singer Maria Callas. But in whatever male human form he approaches her, she senses his evil and rejects him. So – ready for this? – he assumes the form of her pet poodle and receives her affection that way. Eventually she dies. (He unsuccessfully tried to stop her affair with Onassis.) Now Maria is dead but he’s still in love with her – listening to her music, surrounding himself with her photos, talking of her constantly. So we learn a lot about Maria Callas’ life in mini-biographical passages.
Since he has human feelings, he’s so depressed he feels he must talk with someone. Enter main character #2. A woman psychoanalyst. She’s 37; not a beauty, but there’s something about her that attracts men who “had at one time wanted to sleep with one of their teachers.” She’s married to a tax consultant; a hypochondriac and the world’s most boring husband. He loves to talk to friends about his physical problems. It’s “a marriage of mutual inconvenience.”
The woman is a textbook example of a bad psychoanalyst. As her patients ramble, she makes her shopping lists. She thinks “I’m being paid for this.” Having had two recent suicides among her patients, she’s worried about her professional reputation. And yet, if she thought her practice could survive it, “…she would have strongly recommended it to [another patient] as a way out of his suffering.” She thinks “Perhaps I only chose this profession to surround myself with sick people as a way of acquiring a bogus sense of superiority.” Even her receptionist dislikes her references to her sessions as “chat shows.”
The psychologist falls in love with her patient, Nagy, the devil. They go out to eat and take long walks but never have sex. He doesn’t reciprocate her feelings because he’s still in love with Maria. She’s furious at him for the love he wastes on a dead woman. He uses her feelings to let her debase herself – after all, he’s the devil. We know this is not going to end well. And in the end, she shows herself to be as evil as he is.
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Her husband has one weird hobby that we read about in snippets throughout the book. He collects news clippings of bizarre deaths such as a man’s body found near the top of a mountain in full scuba gear. (Scooped up by a plane fighting forest fires.) A dead woman who traveled for hours by bus and everyone thought she was sleeping. A son who cruelly set up a device to electrocute himself when his mother came home and turned on the lights.
There’s some good writing:
She longs for and fears the weekend. “Two Saturdays would be nice. Instead the Saturday is followed by a Sunday which, since you’ve already done your resting, always turns out to be a bit too long.”
“Once you pass thirty-five you discover, to your surprise, that the world has produced a new generation behind your back.”
“Will I be born again?” “You? What for?”
[I like the lines above as a nice accompaniment to these from Maugham’s The Painted Veil: She: “Do you think that the soul is immortal?” He: ”How should I know?”]
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The book I structured like a diary progressing through days of the week. Some sections are her notes that she took of their counseling sessions. An ‘interesting’ and, dare I say, a ‘fun’ read?
Top image from thecocowitch.com Photo of Maria Callas and Aristoteles Onassis from auction.catawiki.com Photo of the author from deutschlandfunk.de
This short novel was a big hit in Switzerland when the Swiss author published it at age 23 in 1994. It’s a coming of age novel about a young girl fromThis short novel was a big hit in Switzerland when the Swiss author published it at age 23 in 1994. It’s a coming of age novel about a young girl from a broken home struggling to find meaning in life. Her mother left her father and walked out of her life when she was very young. Her mother’s second husband, an artist, has just died. “I told her I wanted to visit her. It seemed shameless somehow, as if I had asked a complete stranger to do me a great favor.” Not having seen her for twelve years (the young woman is now 21) she tracks her mother down to go live with her but her mother still has absolutely no interest in her daughter. “[Her mother] can’t stand memories - they weigh her down.” Her father is preoccupied with his latest young girlfriend.
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She hangs out in places where the alleys stink of urine and addicts gather. She looks through drawers for pain killers. She becomes friends with another young woman who is similarly lost. The friend is a street musician who plays just to irritate her wealthy parents. The musician tells the other young woman her mother is dying and she won’t go to visit her in the hospital: “And she wants me to watch while she does it.” The two women hook up with a male friend and go to a rave party and use ecstasy. They talk about traveling to the US, even making arrangements to get tickets, as if they could flee from themselves.
There’s occasional good writing: “[I] watch the smoke from my cigarette take on the shapes of animals. The little creatures climb from my lips to the ceiling, which is a field for them to play in, though most never make it that far. They erase themselves before they get there.”
Maybe this was all a new theme when the book was written in 1994 but it seems old news now. I notice that the book has a very low rating on GR (2.79). I’ll give it a 3.
Photo of the author from schweizer.illustriete.ch ...more
A novella (really a long short story) that is an old European fable. The main character is a young man who sells his shadow to the Devil for a pouch t A novella (really a long short story) that is an old European fable. The main character is a young man who sells his shadow to the Devil for a pouch that produces endless gold coins. But he finds that without a shadow, he is shunned -- an outcast. Women run from him; kids throw stones. His only friend becomes a faithful servant. Two women he loves reject him. The devil reappears and wants to trade his shadow back to him for his soul. This time the man rejects the offer. He becomes a loner; a naturalist; collecting flora and fauna from around the world, easily traveling around the globe in “seven-league boots” that he bought.
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We’re told in the introduction that the author was a French aristocrat living in Germany after his family fled the guillotine. (The book was written in 1814, 15 years after the French Revolution.) He intended the book as a fairy tale for children. The story originates in Jewish culture – the Yiddish word ‘schlemiel’ means a bungler or someone incompetent. The book jacket tells us that the story was a precursor to works like those of Poe and Kafka.
The writing style is “old fashioned” of course – what you would expect from 1814. A sample from when the main character reflects back on life:
“Years later I finally made peace with myself. I first had to learn to respect necessity – what’s done is done, what’s happened has happened, the past is a fait acompli. And then I learned to respect this necessity in and of itself as the wise and providential force that holds sway over the whole grand scheme of things, the machinery in which we are but inconsequential cogs, driven and driving through no will of our own; what must be must be, and what had to happen happened, and all is governed by that providential force that I finally learned to honor as the master of my destiny and the destiny of those who crossed my path.”
I’m not sure why I read this book. I stumbled across it at a library book sale. It’s a bit repetitive - two women reject him because of his shadow; basically the same story twice. There are amazing coincidences that modern authors would not get a way with. And the fable of selling your soul combined with the fable of the boots seems contrived. But – this may have been ground-breaking originality back in 1814!
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It’s interesting too that the author picked up the naturalist theme from his early scientific studies and went on to become a naturalist, writing the story of his participation on a scientific voyage around the world (1815-1818) and gaining fame later in life for his botanical publications.
Top image "Schlemihl's Stream" from Shadow Drawings by Alun Ward at alunward.co.uk Sketch of the author from Wikipedia (gotta love that hair!) ...more
I’m not a hunter and I don’t like animal stories, yet this book grabbed me and I thought it was an excellent short read. (150 pages in a fairly large I’m not a hunter and I don’t like animal stories, yet this book grabbed me and I thought it was an excellent short read. (150 pages in a fairly large font.)
In his home country, the German author (age 96 in 2019) is a well-known journalist and a producer of documentaries on environmental issues, especially the loss of habitat to animals.
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So we have alternating chapters focusing on a wealthy big-game hunter and a bear. Other than a Eastern European hunting guide who writes to the man to get him interested in hunting a giant bear, the bear is as much of a main character as the man. The bear doesn’t “think” but we watch him follow his instincts hunting, foraging, navigating, sleeping, hiding. The East European country rations trophy hunting, charging wealthy people as much as $40,000 to hunt a prize animal. Little by little is led by food to hang out at a hunting blind, waiting for the hunter to have a perfectly staged shot.
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Our wealthy man is a true Master of the Universe. He an international financial consultant, the type who flies around the world attending financial meetings where demonstrators protest. His passion is hunting – he owns three custom-made guns worth $50,000. He’s single; twice-divorced, and his true love, his second wife, was a hunter too; in fact she was a better shot then he was, and she had more animal head trophies than he did. (Giving entirely new meaning to the phrase “trophy wife” lol.)
The hunter is not just a hot shot looking for trophy heads. He has a great respect for the rules of hunting and the dignity of the animal, which he believes separates “a hunter from a butcher.” And he detests the idea of hunting as “a hobby.” His old bear has returned to the area of its birth because it was driven out by economic development. (view spoiler)[ Our international financier, an economic development specialist, eventually realizes “You have already killed this bear, even before you shoot it.” He comes to realize his acts are “an execution.” (hide spoiler)]
A good read.
Painting of the author by Richard Holt at https://richild-holt.de/portfolio/hor... Photo of one of the 45 remaining bears that live in the Tatra Mountians on the border of Poland and Slovakia from polandscience.pap.pl
Rilke (1875-1926) was a famous German poet, born in Prague. He traveled widely throughout Europe, married and had a daughter. A dozen years out of schRilke (1875-1926) was a famous German poet, born in Prague. He traveled widely throughout Europe, married and had a daughter. A dozen years out of school, after Rilke had achieved some fame as a poet, a young man wrote to him asking for advice about life and poetry. Rilke wrote ten letters to him over five years. The young boy was romantic, frail and dreamy; a prisoner, so to speak, in a military boarding school where he was subject to strict discipline, bullying and humiliation. It was the same school that Rilke’s father sent him to in preparation for a career as a military officer. And all those adjectives also applied to Rilke who had been in the identical situation. So, in a sense, Rilke poured his heart out writing to his younger self.
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Some of Rilke’s writings in the ten letters:
“For the creative artist there is no poverty – nothing is insignificant or unimportant.”
“There is nothing that manages to influence a work of art less than critical words. They always result in more or less unfortunate misunderstandings. Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded.”
Writing in 1904 Rilke was amazingly prescient about the upcoming sexual revolution:
“Perhaps the sexes are more closely related than one would think. Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them….This progress shall transform the experience of love, presently full of error, opposed at first by men, who have been overtaken in their progress by women. It shall thoroughly change the love experience to the rebuilding of a relationship meant to be between two persons, no longer just between man and woman….The men, who today cannot yet feel it coming, shall be surprised and defeated by it.”
“Do not allow yourself to be confused in your aloneness by the something within you that wishes to be released from it. This very wish, if you will calmly and deliberately use it as a tool, will help to expand your solitude into far distant realms.”
“Everything you can think about in your childhood is good.”
“Of all my books there are only a few that are indispensable to me. Two of them are constantly at my fingertips wherever I may be. They are here with me now: the Bible and the books of the great Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen.” (Rilke particularly praises Jacobsen’s collection of short stories, Mogens, which I have reviewed here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
“We are unutterably alone, essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important to us….It becomes increasingly clear that it [aloneness] is basically not something we can choose to have or not to have. We simply are alone. One can only delude one’s self and act as though it were not so – that is all.”
The second half of the book is a collection of some of his poems. Most are very accessible. Here are some sections of verse that I liked
From FOR A FRIEND I have my dead, and I would let them go and be surprised to see them all so cheerful, so soon at home in being-dead, so right, so unlike their repute. You, you alone, return; brush past me, move about, persist in knocking something that vibratingly betrays you.
From ORPHEUS. EURYDICE. HERMES. Wrapt in herself she wandered. And her deadness was filling her like fullness. Full as a fruit with sweetness and with darkness was she with her great death, which was so new that for the time she could take nothing in.
From THE CATHEDRAL In those small towns you come to realize how the cathedrals utterly outgrew their whole environment. Their birth and rise, as our own life’s too great proximity will mount beyond our vision and our sense of other happenings, took precedence of all things; as though that were history, piled up in their immeasurable masses in petrification safe from circumstance,
From THE DWARF’S SONG My hands too will always be failing me. How hopelessly stunted they are you can see: damp, heavy, hopping constrictedly like little toads in wet weather. And everything else about me too is old and worn and sad to view; why does God delay to do away with it altogether?
From THE ORPHAN GIRL’S SONG I’m no one, and no one is what I shall be. I'm still too small to exist, I agree; but I'll always be so. … No one can need me: it's too soon now, and tomorrow it's too late.
A very thought-provoking, calming read.
Portrait of Rilke by Leonid Pasternak from Wikipedia ...more
There are a lot of excellent reviews, so I’ll make this one fairly short. [revised 6/12/22]
A man believed to be Stiller, a missing sculptor, is in a SThere are a lot of excellent reviews, so I’ll make this one fairly short. [revised 6/12/22]
A man believed to be Stiller, a missing sculptor, is in a Swiss prison for vague reasons unknown to the reader at first. He has returned to Switzerland after an absence of nine years. He says he’s an American and has a passport to prove it. But his wife, brother and mistress all call him Stiller to his face. The police say the passport is fake. Yet he insists he’s not Stiller.
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The book is structured as seven notebooks Stiller wrote in prison and a summary report from the public prosecutor. (The latter happens to be a friend of Stiller and the husband of one of his mistresses – I guess this happens in small countries!)
SPOILERS FOLLOW
The notebooks also contain elaborate descriptions and stories from Mexico; cowboys discovering and exploring a cave; Rip Van Winkle; Zurich, California docks, and a nature trip. These are reminiscences of his trips during his years away although it’s not clear to me how they tie into the main story. He even claims to have murdered people. And, as Stiller himself asks, what’s the point of telling all these stories? “It doesn’t mean you’ve been there.”
So it’s a book about identity and self-acceptance. “Know thyself” is only good for starters. Suppose you get to know yourself and you don’t like what you find? After all, Stiller is a kind of crazy alcoholic artist who had been striving for top awards and first-rate art shows but not making it.
He feels he was a coward in the Spanish Civil War because he couldn’t do his duty, even though that would have meant shooting unarmed men he was supposed to be guarding when they escaped.
When he leaves Switzerland, thinking he is running off with his latest lover, he abandons his wife in a TB sanitarium.
In the report from the prosecutor at the end of the book, we get a summary of some of Stiller’s ideas: People ruin their lives by making excessive demands on themselves. Consciousness has evolved more than emotions; hence a discrepancy between intellect and feelings. You can lose contact with your personality. A sarcastic attitude toward emotion is a symptom of this. You can’t love your neighbor until you love yourself; that self-acceptance is the hardest. Self-acceptance does not automatically come with age.
After self-acceptance, can this would-be great artist truly find fulfillment selling ceramic pots to American tourists?
By the way, Swiss prison is a country club by American standards. Stiller’s meals are served by his jailer who also cleans his cell. He gets to go out lunch with his wife or friends once a week. Despite this good treatment (or maybe because of it?) Stiller never misses an opportunity to run down the Swiss for their smugness and good fortune … "so clean one can hardly breathe for hygiene." For whatever reason, Stiller reflects the author’s attitude toward his native country as you can read on the entries on Frisch on the web - he wouldn’t even live there.
Some passages I liked:
“That was quite right, just as everything my counsel says is right in a way that never convinces me and yet always puts me in the wrong.”
“At that time Julika had a dog, a fox terrier, of the sort that goes with childless couples.”
“Nobody likes visiting a married couple in a state of crisis, it’s in the air, even if you know nothing about it, and the visitor has the feeling of being present at an armistice, he feels himself somehow misused, employed for a purpose; conversation becomes dangerous…”
A work of great literary value and a pretty good story, if a little slow in places.
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Top photo of a jail cell in Bern, Switzerland from horizonte-magazin.ch The author, Max Frisch (1911-1991), from neustadtprize.org ...more
The introduction gives the complete plot and the story is told retrospectively from the opening scene, so I’m not giving a spoiler warning.
Set in 191The introduction gives the complete plot and the story is told retrospectively from the opening scene, so I’m not giving a spoiler warning.
Set in 1914 right near the outbreak of World War I, a young chemical engineer and his employer’s wife fall in love. Her elderly husband is disabled and the young man (reluctantly) agreed to move into their fancy home to be her husband’s right-hand man. I say reluctantly because he was embarrassed by his poverty – when he moved in he spent all his savings on clothes so the maids wouldn’t see his ratty underwear!
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Just as they are about to consummate their relationship he gets sent to Mexico for what is supposed to be two years. She says “not now” but pledges to give herself to him when he returns. The war intervenes and even letters between them get cut off. NINE years later, after he has married and had kids in Mexico, and her husband has died back in Europe, he’s back!
He had to go back to Europe on business so he looked her up. She’ll keep her promise but what does it mean now? They take what seems like an endless train trip back to a town they had visited on business in earlier years. The journey (the opening scene) seems to be their fulfillment: the endless “getting there;” the limbo of the unfulfilled promise. Will there forever be something “unrelieved and unresolved” between them?
The author was an Austrian Jew who fled central Europe in the 1930’s to go first to the UK, then briefly to the US and finally to Brazil. He and his second wife committed suicide together in Brazil in 1942, perhaps because of the latest bad news coming out of World War II. These themes enter the story when the couple arrives at their hotel and encounter Nazi marchers chanting and raising fists. There’s a mood spoiler.
It’s hard to know how finished this novella really was. Zweig had published it as a short story years earlier and this latest version with handwritten edits was discovered among his papers after his death. An interesting twist is that he was considering two titles for it and this one (Journey Into the Past) was crossed out in favor of “Resistance to Reality.”
All of Zweig’s stories are good and this one is no exception although I don’t think it’s as strong as one other of Zweig’s I have read, The Post-Office Girl.
Another gem from the Nobel Prize-winning author (2009) of The Hunger Angel and The Appointment. She writes about life in Romania under the communist dAnother gem from the Nobel Prize-winning author (2009) of The Hunger Angel and The Appointment. She writes about life in Romania under the communist dictator Ceausescu (1965-1989). Muller grew up as a member of Romania’s large German minority and she writes in German.
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A group of young people from impoverished rural backgrounds are thrown together in college dorms in the big city – the young women, six to a room. The oppression of the dictator is everywhere and talk of his health is constant. Rumors (hopes) of his illnesses, the more severe the better, are talked about every day. One of the women kills herself and that is followed by compulsory attendance at a meeting in an auditorium to admonish her memory. The rules and regulations, the spying and the reporting, the fear of being followed, the inability to really trust anyone else or to safely hide anything for fear of search is stifling:
“We sat together at a table, but our fear stayed locked within each of our heads, just as we’d brought it to our meetings. We laughed a lot, to hide it from each other. But fear always finds an out. If you control your face, it slips into your voice. If you manage to keep a grip on your face and your voice, as if they were dead wood, it will slip out through your fingers. It will pass through your skin and lie there. You can see it lying around on objects close by.”
The narrator is a young woman and her only escape is that she hangs out with a group of young men in a summer house reading banned books. The thrill of discovery is the only thing that counteracts the fear and the boredom. Resist or die: they chose resistance and experience betrayal.
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Top photo from Bucharestlife.net Bottom photo from Kami's blog Mywanderlust.pl ...more
If you were in college in the social sciences 20 or 30 years ago you heard of what has become known as ethology: the study of animal behavior as it reIf you were in college in the social sciences 20 or 30 years ago you heard of what has become known as ethology: the study of animal behavior as it relates to humans. Your “must read pile” started tilting with Robert Ardrey’s On Aggression; Desmond Morris’ – the Naked Ape and King Solomon's Ring, and On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz. This book, Kaltenburg, translated from the German in 2012 (first published 2008) is loosely based on the life of Lorenz, a German animal behavior scholar.
The main character is a graduate student of Professor Kaltenburg of the title. The grad student is a good worker, an introvert and stand-offish, but not really the disciple that Kaltenburg is seeking. Kaltenburg, let’s say these event take place around the early 70’s, is ahead of his time. He’s your prototypical superstar professor; flamboyant; looking for publicity and a chance for a sound bite. He’s the type who makes enemies and has to have them.
The professor is odd in a number of ways. (Aren’t they all – being one, I speak the truth.) The main thing is, as an animal expert, he lets his house be overrun by creatures. Birds live in the attic, ducks, rabbits and guinea pigs on the main floor. The basement is filled with aquarium tanks. He has to have “down time” every day being with the animals and observing them. The dutiful grad student sweeps up duck crap from the driveway before tonight’s cocktail party. He sees in the professor a kind of substitute father in opposition to his own father who was withdrawn and almost timid.
Another oddity, which hangs over the novel but is never discussed in detail, is “what did you do in the war, daddy?” This is set in post-war Germany. As a doctor, Kaltenburg was drafted by the Nazis to do “medical research” but was sent to the front lines were he was quickly captured by the Russians and held as a POW until it ended. According to Wiki, this was true of Lorenz as well except that we know that Lorenz was forced to work on a project to determine if Polish “half-breeds” (Poles with one German parent) should be “allowed to reproduce.” Perhaps he didn’t come up with the right answers because, like Kaltenburg, Lorenz was sent to the front and captured by the Russians.
The other thing that hangs over the novel is that is not just Germany but EAST Germany. So these folks experienced Nazi tyranny and then Communist domination as well. The suspicion, paranoia and bureaucratic bungling of Communist East Germany become another theme. Mainly we see the repercussions of this through the grad student’s girlfriend and later wife. She lives her life by using Proust as a handbook. Like Lorenz, Karlberg eventually defects to Austria, leaving his would-be disciple behind after years of collaboration since the grad student became the director of his research institute. The student is left with a feeling of “what was that all about?”
There’s no real plot but there is an additional theme: the quirks of memory. In many places in the book the characters wrestle with the tricks of memory, such as distinctly remembering so-and-so at that party, but it couldn’t have been because so-and-so was out of the country that entire year; yet you could swear… It may sound dull but it kept my attention and I thought it was a good read. ...more
A late middle-aged bank guard in Paris is startled by a pigeon in the hallway of his dumpy rooming house. We are told in the story that the pigeon symA late middle-aged bank guard in Paris is startled by a pigeon in the hallway of his dumpy rooming house. We are told in the story that the pigeon symbolizes chaos and anarchy.
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This leads to a chain of events where the guard first becomes introspective and then disillusioned about his whole life. We assume he might be Jewish because of the time frame of the story based on the horrors in Germany and because the earliest memories he has are of his mother and father disappearing and of him being shuffled among distant relations to be hidden.
After a bad marriage that lasted only a few months, the guard gave up on life. For decades now he has spent his days standing on three marble steps outside a bank building. And every night for decades he has eaten food off a hotplate and watched TV in his room. He has no family, avoids people, and is absolutely friendless.
Yet, as he reflects on the lives of homeless men he sees on the streets, he thinks things could be worse. Where do we go from here?
Not a masterpiece but thought-provoking and a quick read – only 115 pages.
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The author is better known for the much darker novel, Perfume, the story of an 18th-century serial killer that was made into a movie. Born in 1949, the author is also famous for being a recluse - kind of like Thomas Pynchon or JD Salinger.
A collection of short stories set in former East Germany, so they reflect an era when 'anything you write may be used against you.' It was a particulaA collection of short stories set in former East Germany, so they reflect an era when 'anything you write may be used against you.' It was a particularly terrifying time for those who dared to publish. These are a mix of stories, mostly from the 1970s, and I’ll focus on ones that have to do with the censorship and the political tyranny of that time.
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In one story a 'great leader' presides at the reviewing stand as a military parade goes by in perfect order and decorum. When the parade is over and the crowd starts to break up and mill around, the leader is seized by panic at the relaxation of that politically-imposed frozen discipline.
A young woman is disillusioned by the mandated order of the society she lives in. She has her permission to change her residence in her pocketbook; her travel permit; her permit for her new job and her mandated new address. (view spoiler)[ Then she lies down in a park at night and freezes to death. (hide spoiler)]
The voice of an anonymous citizen is heard saying an improper thing during a TV interview. The political machinery gets in motion to track him down by having linguists study his accent and the police review travel permits.
An old man is naïve enough to actually initiate the official process of requesting a visa to leave the country permanently. Another man can’t get a travel permit to visit his dying father. He is repeatedly turned down with no reason given and no recourse to appeal.
In another story, a poet dies and his good friend – a political leader who lets his hair down with the poet over drinks --learns that the poet kept meticulous notes. Now the politician is desperate to find those notes.
A poet dies in prison for his writings. Poets are featured in several of these stories and they were obviously an endangered species under the East German regime.
An invalid writer, confined to his fifth-floor walk-up room, has a view of the Wall from his apartment. He starts describing the wall and its barriers in a story and then realizes that if it gets published he will bring suspicion on himself for planning to escape!
Frightening stories.
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The author (b. 1935) started writing in East Germany but could not publish his works there due to censorship. He worked as a translator until he was able to emigrate to West Germany and start publishing. While he has written about 30 books, including novels and academic books (he was a linguist) only a few appear to be available in English and a few more are in French.
The Berlin Wall from cbsnews.com The author from Wikipedia
[Revised, pictures and shelves added 6/3/23] ...more
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