A Common Reader is . . . . . . written by Tom Cunliffe, of East Sussex, England. It consists of book reviews and more general articles about reading and books and currently receives over 5000 unique visitors each month. So far 213 book reviews have been published.
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 Peirene Press has made quite a splash with its first three elegantly produced novels. All three are translations from European languages, all are short (approximately 125 pages) and they all share a precision of writing which might make other novels seem verbose and over-long.
Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, the third in the series, is published this week. It is simple in concept, being an account of a young woman’s walk to church from her home in a guest room of an old-people’s home in Rome (which is run by Protestant nuns). The year is 1943, and the young woman is German, her husband a young ordinand who despite an earlier injury to his leg, has been sent to support the German army in their campaign in Tunisia.
The woman is heavily pregnant with only a month to go before the baby is due, and as she walks through the city we read of her thoughts on love, war and the German cause, while she also notices the beautiful surroundings as she passes the landmarks of Rome – which Delius describes in such detail that it is tempting to get on a plane and fly out to see them for yourself.
The novel consists of a single sentence extended over its 117 pages. But this does not make the book difficult to read because the text is broken up into paragraphs, and the technique preserves the flow of the woman’s thoughts over the hour of her walk.
Continue reading Review: Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman – Friedrich Christian Delius
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 Sometimes I think I must be missing something. Thomas Bernhard, according to his Wikipedia entry “is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era”. The novel before me, Old Masters, has its own Wikipedia page, and has been selected by Penguin to be included in its glossy new Central European Classics range. Well, I struggled through to the end (somehow) and was left feeling that this Emperor certainly has no clothes.
An 82 year old man, the musicologist Reger, sits on a settee in the Bordone Room of the Viennese Kunsthistoirisches Museum, contemplating Tintoretto’s painting, The White Bearded Man – as he has done for four or five hours every second day for the last 30 years. While doing this he rails against society, art, his fellow men, the state of Vienna, even the condition of the cities public lavatories. His thoughts are communicated to the reader by his friend Atzbacher, who seems in awe of the great musicologist and shares his dismal world view. The only other character in the book is the gallery steward Irrsigler, who has assisted Reger over the last 30 years by making sure that no-one else sits on the settee when Reger is due one of his visits.
Reger has so many chips on his shoulders it is almost impossible to count them:
The art hanging on these walls is nothing but state art, at least that hanging here in the picture gallery of the Kunsthistoirisches Museum. All the paintings hanging on these wall are nothing but painting by state artists. Always only a visage, never a face. Always only lineaments, never features. All these painters were nothing but utterly mendacious state artists, pampering to the vanity of their clients, not even Rembrandt is an exception. Just look as Velazquez, nothing but state art, or Lotto or Giotto, always only state art, just as that dreadful proto-Nazi and pre-Nazi Durer, who put nature on his canvas and killed it, this horrible Durer from the depth of his soul.
Continue reading Review: Old Masters – Thomas Bernard
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 Imagine an elderly uncle dying in Venezuela leaving you his fortune. You fly to Caracas to tie things up only to discover that your uncle has appointed as executor of the will, a businessman you have never heard of before, who professes a desire to settle things as quickly as possible but then adopts every tactic in the book to prevent you inheriting. That is the basic plot of The Inheritance, and it is executed with great style and panache by its author Peter Stephan Jungk.
Daniel Loew is a published poet, totally committed to his art despite the financial constraints such a life brings. He lives with his wife and their baby in London, but he seems to be unable to let go of his vocation as a poet in order to take a job that might enable them to live more comfortably. Then word comes that Daniel’s Uncle Alexander has died in Caracas and made him sole inheritor of his estate. Daniel begins a quest for an elusive fortune, which dangles before him like a ripe fruit, always just out of reach however many steps he climbs to pluck it.
Daniel flies to Caracas only to discover that things are not as they might seem. For Uncle Alexander has appointed as executor of his will, one Julio Kirshman, a highly dubious businessman who seems to have other motives than ensuring that Daniel gets the considerable fortune owing to him.
The book is set in 1992 when Hugo Chavez attempted to overthrow the government by coup d’état. When Daniel arrives in Caracas, the coup is underway and jet fighters thunder over his hotel and rebels attempt to storm the presidential palace. Daniel is confined to his hotel while the fighting goes on, eventually managing to get out to meet the executor, Julio Kirshman, at his offices. Kirshman owns a flourishing import/export business, but is strangely evasive about the will, while claiming to be Uncle Alexander’s closes friend:
This is where I always used to sit, next to your dear uncle, when I visited him. I was the only one he wanted to see, the only one he allowed to come near him, those last years of his life – it was me he turned to for help, me he used to call in the middle of the night, over all sorts of nonsense, he wanted to see me, because he was frightened. Just me. . . And where were you all the time? Did you ever come to see him?”
Continue reading Review: The Inheritance – Peter Stephan Jungk
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 One of the purposes of reading is to give you an insight into other worlds, to help you understand what its like to be someone else, in a situation entirely different to your own. People without that curiosity have no need to read, and books like Settlement would be for them pointless. After all, pre-unification East Germany was not the most interesting of places, with its stultified society in which following the rules was the best guarantee of a quiet life and the only way to prosperity was through engaging with an incredibly dull political system.
Christopher Hein is adept at capturing the mood of the old German Democratic Republic and I find that even as I write this review, a sort of heaviness comes over me, a reluctance to engage with the issues of the time. The flat prose of Settlement, perfectly captures the mood of 1950s East Germany, echoing the need to keep things to yourself, to mind your own business and keep you out of trouble. However, its apparent simplicity disguises complex themes.
As the book opens we find ourselves in the provincial town of Guldenberg in 1950 soon after the Second World War. German refugees are flooding over into East Germany from the lands ceded to Poland, but with the general poverty of the nation, they receive scant comfort from the settled Germans who have problems of their own to deal with. The refugees are temporarily accommodated with German families or else make their own homes in derelict buildings and outhouses.
Continue reading Review: Settlement – Christopher Hein
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 This book, Measuring The World, has had rather mixed reviews both on Amazon, and also by book bloggers such as ANZ Lit Lovers who wrote a thorough and convincing review, but from a rather different perspective from my own. The difference in opinions seems to lie in reviewers’ views on what I might call “fictionalised biography”. Is it acceptable to take historical figures and provide distinctly novel-ish accounts of their lives and adventures? These accounts differ from what might be described as literary biography, where a genuine attempt is made to recount events and conversations that actually happened. In fictionalised biography, the lives of the subjects are used by the author as a sort of jumping-off point from which elaborate and entertaining stories are woven which are roughly in line with might have happened. I think Measuring the World, definitely falls into this latter category, for not only are conversations and events recorded which could never be verified, but also, some of the real biographical details are tampered with and even changed to fit the story.
The arch-exponent of this type of book, would be British writer Beryl Bainbridge, who has written novels about Samuel Johnson, Captain Scott, Adolf Hitler and many others, winning several Booker Prize short-listed nominations in the process. Adam Foulds also was short-listed for the Booker with his novel The Quickening Maze about poet John Clare. Lets also not forget the wonderful novel, Perfume, by another German writer Patrick Suskind which is roughly based on the life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille.
Continue reading Review: Measuring The World – Daniel Kehlmann
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 To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Tin Drum, Gunther Grass’s publishers decided to co-ordinate publication of new translations in a wide range of languages. Gunther Grass gathered translators together in Gdansk, and Breon Mitchell, the translator into English reports that,
Each day Grass sat down with us, read aloud from the text, pointed out difficult passages on practically every page, and allowed us to ask any questions we wished. Even though all sessions were conducted in German, the variety of questions, given the range of ten European languages, was fascinating.
I first read The Tin Drum about 15 years ago and am pleased to say that reading this new version is like coming to this remarkable book for the first time. In some ways, this is coming to the book for the first time, for the original translation apparently toned down some of the more outrageous statements of the central characters and also sanitised many of the events which it was thought were too shocking for its 1961 audience.
The Tin Drum is a magisterial novel, perhaps one of the greatest, yet most subtle commentaries on the rise of Nazism and the events leading up to the Second World War. Yet this is far from being a history book. It revolves around Oskar, the man-child, who somehow arrested his own development at the age of 3, retaining the height of a three year old all his adult life, and refusing to go to school or to participate with other children. Continue reading Review: The Tin Drum – Gunther Grass
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 The English translation of Kahn and Englemann was published this year by the Canadian publisher Biblioasis, just three days after its author Hans Eichner died at the age of 87. Eichner, an Austrian Jew, was well-placed to write this story of a Jewish family from rural Hungary as they made their way through the trials of the last century, for much of the book echoes his own family and personal history.
In the midst of the story is of course the Holocaust, but it features more as an ironic exit room for many of the Kahns and Engelmann’s, for Eichner does not dwell on the horrors, but reports that such and such “turned his face to the wall and starved to death in the Theresienstadt concentration camp” – after all, the horrors are well known, and perhaps Eichner realised that he had little to add to those more detailed accounts from other authors. However, more on this towards the end of this review.
The story begins in Tapolca, near Lake Balaton in Hungary, where the Kahn’s are wealthy estate owners. However, the story begins with the narrator’s grandmother, Sidonie, at the age of 17 deciding to marry a poor shoe-maker. Nobody can persuade her otherwise, and she even escapes from virtual house-arrest to go to the boy she has chosen for herself, before long returning home expecting a baby.
Sidonie is a resourceful girl and much to her parents’ disgust, starts selling vegetables from a market stall. She is an ambitious young woman and gets her way in everything she sets her heart on, and soon the young family are loading all their belongings onto a cart and making a terribly arduous journey to Vienna. Continue reading Review: Kahn and Englemann – Hans Eichner
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 In Little Man What Now, we read about life for ordinary people in Germany in the early 1930s. Unemployment has reached frightening levels and inflation is rapidly reducing the value of wages and savings. Berlin is a city in which wages are low and employees have to compete with their colleagues to keep their jobs, breeding mistrust and back-stabbing among the workforce. At a time like this, to get your girlfriend pregnant and have to marry her is a frightening prospect. So sets the scene for the story of Sonny and Lammchen as they embark on marriage and parenthood just before the Nazi Party comes to power.
Hans Fallada’s novels were international best-sellers before the war, similarly acclaimed by those of fellow Germans, Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse. In 1932, Hollywood even turned Little Man What Now into a movie, but when Hitler learned that the film had been produced by Jews, Fallada began to attract the attention of the Gestapo leading in 1935 to him being classified as an “undesirable author”.
Fallada refused to join the Nazi party and suffered arrest and even imprisonment by the Nazis. As war drew near, Fallada refused to flee to safety, despite his international success. The mental strain of those years took a terrible toll on Fallada’s state of mind, and he died soon after the war in 1947. Continue reading Review: Little Man, What Now? – Hans Fallada
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 As a reader who enjoys reading books in translation, I was pleased to discover One World Classics whose aim is “to expand the literary canon in the English-speaking world through a series of mainstream and lesser-known classics, often by commissioning new translations”.
I have sampled just one of their books, The King’s Bride, by the German writer E T A Hoffman (1776-1822), and enjoyed the high production values of the volume, but also the book itself, from a writer I had not read before. Wikipedia tells me that Hoffman’s stories were tremendously influential in the 19th century, and he is one of the key authors of the Romantic movement. I was surprised to read that he wrote the story, The Nutcracker which inspired Tchaikowsky’s well-known ballet.
The King’s Bride is on the face of it a children’s story, but with dark undertones which communicate messages about the fragility of human relationships and the tendency of the innocent to embrace that which will destroy their innocence.
A young country-woman, the daughter of an eccentric nobleman fallen on hard times, delights in her kitchen garden. She tends her vegetables as though they were children, listing her lettuces and cabbages,
Variegated Featherheads, Rapunticas, English Turnips, Little Greenheads, Montrues, Great Moguls and Yellow Kinsheads.
Clearly a keen gardener! Continue reading Review: The King’s Bride – E T A Hoffman
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 It has been shown through psychological and historical research that large numbers of people are capable of acting with brutality and callousness towards other human beings. Equally, a smaller number of people are able to hold to humanitarian values at whatever cost to themselves. In looking at Nazi Germany, it is tempting to say that “it could never have happened here”, that there must have been some terrible flaw in the German psyche which led to its wholesale adoption of the Nazi philosophy of death. However, it is all too apparent that in the right (wrong?) circumstances, national madness can in fact break out anywhere, leading to torture and genocide on an almost incoceivable scale.
I find myself fascinated by the question of what it was actually like to be German in the 1930s, when Nazism came into the ascendancy and ordinary people were faced with the terrible choice of either adapting to life under the regime (and thereby being complicit in its crimes), or else facing terrible persecution.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian of the era believed that the choice was simple. Obedience to truth inevitably resulted in rejection of the regime, that the only choice was complicity or protest, the former leading to a moral death, the latter leading to self-sacrifice but with a clear conscience. Alone in Belin complements this belief by illustrating the out-working of the moral choices that ordinary people were faced with in those years and it is fascinating to read this “ground-level” description of life among factory workers, post office officials, minor criminals and others. Fallada focuses on those who were on the cutting edge of these choices, some taking the route of complicity, while others resisted, but at great cost to themselves.
Continue reading Review: Alone in Berlin – Hans Fallada
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