Category: German

Book notes: Caldwell, Delius, Harrison

16th February 2011 / / 4 Comments

Lucy Caldwell, The Meeting Point (2011)

Euan Armstrong takes his young family to Bahrain, ostensibly to undertake missionary work; but Euan’s wife Ruth begins to question all that she holds dear when she discovers the true nature of that work. Meanwhile, teenage Noor Hussain has returned to Bahrain from England to live with her father; she has struggled to fit in and is contemplating suicide. But then Noor finds new hope in the person of Ruth, just as Ruth is falling for Noor’s brother Farid.

There are times, particularly towards the beginning, when Caldwell’s description feels over-egged; but The Meeting Point ultimately succeeds because of the elegance with which it portrays its central dynamic. Both Ruth and Noor have unrealistic desires which will inevitably lead them to clash; the progression of those events is thoroughly credible. Caldwell also draws her protagonists deftly; there’s a nice contrast between the broad strokes of Noor’s teenage impulsiveness, and Ruth’s more measured personality. All in all, The Meeting Point is a well-wrought novel that’s very much worth reading.

Lucy Caldwell’s website

Friedrich Christian Delius, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman (2006/10)

Another fine novella from Peirene Press, this one translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch. Margherita is a young German woman who came to Rome to be with her soldier husband Gert, only for him shortly after to be sent to Africa in the aftermath of El Alamein. Now, in 1943, she is alone in Rome, unable to speak Italian, but grateful for the small German enclave which surrounds her. We follow Margherita as she makes her way to a Bach concert, and reflects on her situation.

At a structural level, Portrait of the Mother is masterful, as its 117 pages comprise a single sentence. The affect of this is of a constant unspooling of thought and detail, with certain ideas recurring throughout. Delius captures particularly well Margherita’s naivety, and the irony underpinning it: insulated as she is her little bubble, she can’t comprehend the difficulties faced by ordinary Roman citizens; she’s sure that everything will be fine with Gert, just as she is sure that Rome would never be a target for bombing… Delius’s Portrait is a sharp character study.

M. John Harrison, The Ice Monkey (1983)

One of my reading resolutions for this year is to get around to reading something by M. John Harrison, who has been on my TBR list for rather longer than I’d have liked. I decided to start with collection of seven short stories, which has proven very interesting to read.

The title story sees Harrison’s narrator, Spider, who takes his friend Jones to visit the latter’s estranged ex-wife, Maureen – it doesn’t go well. Later, Jones and Spider go climbing on Ben Nevis, and that ends in tragedy. This piece sets a certain tone that carries through much of the rest of the anthology – many characters have similarly broken lives, for example – but there’s also continuity at a deeper, more structural level. The ending of ‘The Ice Monkey’ reads to me like a formal parody of a horror story, as it goes through the motions of hinting at a supernatural agency without actually doing so with any conviction – as though to emphasise that the mess-ups in the story have very human and natural causes, and there is no escape into the possibility of ‘magic’.

A deliberate turning-away from the fantastic seems integral to the affect of Harrison’s stories, here, as rituals and other strange happenings remain as mysterious to reader and characters alike at the end of a piece as they were at the beginning. In that respect, I’m reminded of when, last year, I read Scarlett Thomas’s Our Tragic Universe, whose aesthetic is also ‘anti-explanatory’ – though I find Harrison’s tales embody their aesthetic  more thoroughly.

The Ice Monkey is perhaps best summed up for me by its final sentences. In the closing story, ‘Egnaro’ is the name of a secret place which is heard fleetingly by various of its characters. Where other tales might uncover the truth of that place, Egnaro remains no more than a whisper’ As the story’s narrator remarks:

The secret is meaningless before you know it: and…worthless when you do. If Egnaro is the substrate of mystery which underlies all daily life, then the reciprocal of this is also true, and it is the exact dead point of ordinariness which lies beneath every mystery. (p. 144)

My key lasting impression of the stories in The Ice Monkey is that they highlight such ordinariness. Now I look forward to reading Harrison’s Viriconium, to find out if that impression will remain.

Book notes: Preussler, Glattauer, Bauer

8th February 2011 / / 4 Comments

Otfried Preussler, Krabat (1971/2)

First published in English under the title The Satanic Mill, this German children’s classic (translated by Anthea Bell) has now been reissued under its original title as part of the Library of Lost Books. It is the story of Krabat, a boy in 16th-century Saxony, who investigates a strange mill and finds himself compelled to become the miller’s apprentice, working alongside his eleven journeymen. The Master teaches his journeymen dark magic, but at a price: every New Year’s Eve, one of them will die.

Some children’s books can, of course, be well appreciated when one reads them as an adult; but I find myself wishing that I’d read Krabat as a child, because I can imagine how much stronger the sense of discovery and excitement would have been. Even so, I very much enjoyed Preussler’s crisply-told tale. What’s particularly striking is how much the book doesn’t reveal; there’s very little about Krabat’s life before the mill, and much about the miller and his powers is also left open to interpretation. As a result, the air of mystery and strangeness around the book never goes away; I was left guessing what would happen up to the very last page – there is no sense in this novel that a happy ending is guaranteed.

Links
Otfried Preussler’s website
Publisher Scott Pack blogs about the book

Daniel Glattauer, Love Virtually (2006/11)

It starts simply enough: Emmi Rothner tries to cancel a magazine subscription, but mistypes the address and her email ends up in Leo Leike’s inbox. He notifies her of the mistake, and all is forgotten until, months later, Leo receives Emmi’s automated Christmas message and yet another email meant for the magazine. So begins an intimate email correspondence underpinned by something that may yet turn out to be love.

Love Virtually is told entirely through the medium of Emmi’s and Leo’s emails (in a nice touch, the novel uses  two translators – Katharina Bielenberg and Jame Bulloch, who are a married couple  – each working on the messages of one protagonist). At first, I was unsure of this device, as, by their nature, such correspondences are always going to be more interesting for the participants than for outside observers. And, sure enough, there were times when the tone of the emails – enticingly drawn-out for Leo and Emmi, but rather long-winded for this reader – tried my patience.

But, as I got further in (and the novel was swift and snappy enough that this didn’t take long), I warmed to the ebb and flow of the exchange, which is a kind of courtship dance that creates personae for the two correspondents whilst occasionally offering glimpses of the real characters underneath. Both protagonists could gain or lose from the dialogue: Leo is single, though the sparks of his recently-ended relationship have not yet burnt out entirely; Emmi is married with children, but seems to drive the correspondence more than Leo, as it provides her with something that her existing relationship does not. Whatever reservations I might have had towards the beginning, by the end of Love Virtually I was gripped, wanting to know what happened. The ending is judged perfectly, and paves the way for the sequel, which will receive its English-language publication later in the year.

Links
Publishers’ interview with the translators
Love Virtually reviewed elsewhere: Vulpes Libris; Book Monkey; The Complete Review.

Belinda Bauer, Blacklands (2010)

My first choice for the Great Transworld Crime Caper – not that there’s much of the caper about this book – I first came across Blacklands as one of last year’s TV Book Club choices. I didn’t read it at the time, but I should have, because I missed a gem. Twelve-year-old Steven Lamb is preoccupied with finding the body of his uncle Billy, assumed to have been murdered as a child. Steven keeps digging on Exmoor, but without success; in desperation, he writes a letter to convicted child-killer Arnold Avery (one of whose victims is thought to be Billy)) asking where his uncle’s body is – and a game of cat and mouse begins.

What makes Blacklands work so well is Bauer’s sharply observant eye, and the careful positioning of Steven’s and Avery’s correspondence (and the search for Billy’s body) in her characters’ lives. Steven’s Nan – Billy’s mother – is forever scarred by the loss of her son (‘underneath she would always be Poor Mrs Peters’, [p. 8]) , which she refuses to accept. This has translated into a fractured household; Steven’s quest to find Billy is partly an attempt to patch up his family, but also his way of bringing purpose to a life beset by troubles at school as well as home.

For Avery, Steven’s letters also bring a sense of purpose and hope, though a much more chilling one – particularly after an inadvertent reflection in a photograph taken by Steven reveals to Avery that his correspondent is a child. Bauer opens enough of a window on to Avery’s mind to make our visits there deeply disturbing, but not so much that we lose sight of the monster he is. The author also builds tension very effectively as the novel progresses. Blacklands is a difficult read at times, but ultimately I found it a rewarding one.

Links
Belinda Bauer’s website
Blacklands reviewed elsewhere: It’s a Crime!; Petrona; Catherine, Caffeinated.

Perfume by Patrick Süskind (1985/6)

12th July 2009 / / 2 Comments

9780141189192L Perfume is one of those books I had heard of by reputation, but didn’t actually know anything about. And now I’ve read it… well, it’s not what I was expecting, but it’s good. I liked it, but saying so feels a little uncomfortable — as well it ought!

Patrick Süskind tells the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a man with a preternaturally acute sense of smell, but no human odour of his own. Growing up in eighteenth-century Paris, Grenouille begins as a tanner’s apprentice, but soon inveigles his way into the employ of Giuseppe Baldini, the renowned perfumer. Baldini has fallen on hard times, but Grenouille’s unparalleled instinct for concocting scents turns the perfumer’s fortune around, and Jean-Baptiste is subsequently able to leave and become a journeyman.

Over the years, Grenouille learns more of the techniques of perfume-making, and discovers how to manufacture scents that can provoke a certain reaction in people — he can go unnoticed by people, or catch their attention, as he desires. But Grenouille’s wish is for the greatest of all perfumes, the one which will make him adored by — and hence gain power over — all. The secret ingredient of this scent is the essence of innocent girls — and so the murders begin…

Süskind pulls off a very difficult feat in Perfume, which is to write a book about an utterly vile and unsympathetic character, and make it compulsively readable. This is in large part down to his prose style (and, by extension, to John Woods’ excellent translation), which has the feel and quality of a myth or fairytale. The paragraphs are often long, the description often detailed; but in a way that offers depth and flow rather than weighing the narrative down. Süskind is particularly good (as one would hope and expect) at evoking smells: his opening pages are a useful reminder that eighteenth-century European cities would have stunk; more generally, he emphasises the importance of a sense that’s all too easy to forget about when writing and reading fiction.

As a character, Jean-Baptiste Granouille is someone you’d hope never to encounter, the kind of person you’d hope could never even exist. He’s single-minded to the point that his entire being is distorted by his obsession. All this makes Grenouille extremely difficult to empathise with; and the author makes little attempt to help us. Süskind does a lot of telling rather than showing, which has the effect of sealing Grenouille inside his own mind. Even though we see his deepest imaginings, Grenouille remains a cold and distant figure. This is quite deliberate, I’m sure, and in keeping with that fairytale style; it pushes the story slightly out of reality.

Then comes the uncomfortable question: does Perfume make light of mass murder, or at least fail to take it seriously enough? On balance, I would say not; though the issue is thorny. Grenouille gets his comeuppance in the end, but it’s a fairytale kind of comeuppance. I don’t think Süskind dwells gratuitously on the killings, but there is a nagging sense that the idiom in which he’s chosen to write doesn’t allow him to treat the situation with the gravity it deserves.

Still, I think Perfume is a powerful book. Yes, it’s pretty much geared towards doing one thing and one thing only — but it does that thing very well indeed. The book kept me reading to the end, and left me thinking about it afterwards; which is a fine outcome for the reading of any novel.

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