Book bloggers can’t afford to get bogged down in a mediocre book for they end up with nothing to write about.  And I don’t feel inspired to write anything at all about 1Q84 – plenty of other people have had a go at it (“once again Murakami has produced something that is truly magical. . .”) and I don’t want to spoil their party.

On the other hand, After Midnight, but Irmgard Keun really is worth reading and manages to say more in 160 pages than Murakami does in 900.

Set in 1930′s Frankfurt, After Midnight tells the story of Sanna, a young woman who finds herself embroiled in controversy among friends and relatives who have very mixed opinions about the new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.  Sanna is not political, but at a time when politics is forcing its way into every aspect of life, even a love-lorn young woman finds herself having to be careful what she says.  Even close relatives can betray you if you seem half-hearted about the Nazi party.

Sanna’s best friend Gerti has the misfortune of being in love with a person of mixed-race (i.e. partly Jewish).  Sanna finds it hard to understand why the beautiful Gerti has fixed on Dieter Aaron when there are plenty of men around the authorities would let her love.  Sanna finds life so confusing,

Its hard enough to know your way around all the rules the authorities lay down for business – business as we all know can be very trickily organised – and now we have to know the rules for love too.  It isn’t easy, it really isn’t.  Before you know it, you may find yourself castrated or in prison, which isn’t pleasant.  Love is supposed to be all right and German women are supposed to have children, but before you do that, some kind of process involving feelings is called for.  And the law says no mistakes must be made in this process.  I suppose the safest thing is not to love anyone at all.  For as long as that’s allowed.

The fascinating thing about this book is the street-level accounts of conversations and relationship.  Irmgard Keun is adept at describing the lives of ordinary people as they go about their business.  I was reminded of Hans Fallada’s books, but there is more humour and a lighter touch about After Midnight, particularly in the descriptions of afternoon and evening sessions in bars and café in which Keun’s writing sparkles with life and humour.

I particularly  enjoyed the story of Hitler’s arrival in Frankfurt in grand procession.  Sanna and her friend have been dragged up to a balcony window to watch the proceedings.  A thrill of expectation surges through the crowds as they hear the motor cavalcade, and just as Hitler’s car passes,

A little sky-blue ball came rolling out of the ranks of the crowd and into the street, making for the car.  It was little Berta Silias, who’d been chosen to break through the crowd, because the Fuhrer often likes to be photographed with children.  But he can’t have felt like it that this time.  Berta was left standing there, a little solitary speck with a huge bouquet of flowers.

Later on in the day, Berta’s family and friends gather in the Henninger Bar and Berta is persuaded to recite the poem that her father had written for her to recite to Hitler.

A little German maid you see
A German mother I shall be
My Fuhrer, and I bring to thee
The fairest flowers of Germany

Sanna and her friends fail to catch the new spirit of Germany and before long they are being classed as dissidents.  This non-political girl find that politics affects everything and she has to make some terrible decisions.  The writer’s skill is in blending the more serious passages with a generally satirical commentary on the new mood in Germany.  In thinking of the German people under Nazi rule as a homogeneous mass, we can forget that by the time Hitler came to power, a considerable opposition movement had been eliminated by the most brutal means.  Those who were not wholly for him were assassinated or exiled, and Irmgard Keun records some poignant stories of those who had to make terrible choices in order to survive.

I am grateful to Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Caroline and Lizzy’s German Literature Month for introducing me to this book.  I was also fascinated to read about the life of Irmgard Keun on Wikipedia.  Her books were banned by the Nazis and she was forced into exile – evidently After Midnight is based on first-hand experience.  I highly recommend it as an insightful read about terrible times, but made accessible by a warm human touch which makes this an enjoyable reading experience.

Robert Walser's Microscipts - (grabbed from amazon.co.uk book listing)

I won’t go into the life-stories of these two eccentric authors as Hermann Ungar’s life is described well in this biography on the Twisted Spoon website and Robert Walser’s in this excellent article by J M Coetzee on the New York Review of Books website.

Walser’s Selected Stories is a very satisfying little volume containing some very short stories and a a smaller number of longer ones.  The most substantial story seems to be The Walk.  Walser specialises in descriptions of his over-sensitive state of mind and delights in writing about banal, trivial events but with a level of descriptive writing which reminds me slightly of a Buddhist writings which exhort one to value the present moment (“mindfulness”) and to meditate on little things as a way to enlightenment.

In this story, the narrator wakes up in a relaxed state of mind and sets out on a long rambling walk, partly to conduct a couple of items of business but mostly to experience the flow of daily life around him.

I found myself, as I walked in the open, bright and cheerful street, in a romantically adventurous state of mind, which pleased me profoundly.  The morning world spread out before my eyes appeared as beautiful to me as if I saw it for the first time.  Everything I saw made upon me a delightful impression of frienliness, of goodliness, and of youth.  All sorrow, all pain, and all grave thoughts were as vanished, although I vividly sensed a certain seriousness, a tone, still before me and behind me.

The narrator proceeds to visit a bookshop, a bank, a tailor, a tax office.  Along the way he encounters various people who he stops to talk to.  In one sense, the “story” is completely pointless other than as a vehicle for the narrator’s meditations on life and current affairs (his intense dislike of motor cars for example).  But I believe the “point” as such is as I mentioned above, to take a certain joy in the simple routines of daily life.  I was reminded of Henry David Thoreau, who when asked if he was much travelled, replied, “I have travelled much in Concord County”.  A man who could live by Walden Pond for two years would surely have appreciated the writings of Robert Walser.

With an introduction by Susan Sontag, Selected Stories would be a good introduction to Walser’s work and is a very attractive book to dip into.

As an aside, I’d like to include this painting of the Robert Walser’s death, by British artist and novelist Billy Childish.  Robert Walser was found dead in the snow while walking near the asylum in which he spent the last 27 years of his life.   Childish produced this memorable painting which I am allowed to reproduce here due to its inclusion in Wikimedia.

Hermann Ungar’s book of stories Boys and Murderers is a much less innocent volume of stories than Robert Walser’s.  Ungar’s tone is sinister, even disturbing, and when we embark on reading one we never know what strange people we are going to encounter there.  In The Story of a Murder for example, we read of a hunch-backed barber Hascheck, who cruelly manipulates the narrator’s pathetic father by encouraging him in a series of lies about his past, and then suggesting that he is about to be exposed as a fraud.  It is not so much the emerging story which holds the reader’s interest, fascinating though it is, as the dark thoughts and convoluted reasonings of the characters.

Similarly, in A Man and Maid, we learn of a young man’s obsession with an older house-maid despite her unattractiveness and her complete lack of personal qualities.  As he rises in his career and becomes wealthy, he persuades her to travel with him to America where he eventually installs her in a brothel – for disreputable reasons which are only partly elucidated by Ungar’s description of his inner dialogue.

Despite the unpromising material of many of these stories, Ungar created a unique collection quite unlike anything else – with the possible exception of other writers of the Kafka school of writing.

I took these two books on holiday with me – neither qualified as typical holiday reading but they were good to dip in and out of and are definitely two small volumes which will remain on my shelves rather than ending up in my usual charity-shop book boxes.

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.

No artist escapes Reger’s diatribes, nor philosopher, nor musician

The state composer Beethoven, as the Tempest Sonata demonstrates, is positively ridiculously serious.  It is very ponderous, like a lot of Beehoven’s work.  Even Mozart did not escape Kitsch, the coy and the frisky often turn somersaults in the most unbearable way in those superficial operas. A turtle dove here, a turtle dove there, a raised forefinger here, a raised forefinger there.  That too is Mozart.  Mozart’s music is full of petticoat and frilly undies kitsch.

And so on for 250 pages.  It is the sheer quantity and intensity of Reger’s fulminations which makes them sometimes amusing.  It takes a rare soul to feel that the world and its occupants are this bad.  To have reached a stage where you hold everything and everyone in contempt, exceeds descriptive terms like jaded and world weary – Reger is so limited in his outlook and so embittered that death seems to be the only solution, and yet he seems unable to do anything other than wait for that final event rather than doing anything to precipitate it.

My problem with the book is that it might have made a good short story, among a collection of others, but on its own, it is just too long.  The book is not broken into chapters, perhaps demonstrating the unstoppable flow of Reger’s bitter ramblings, but Bernhard has not even given us paragraph breaks.  The means that when you put the book down, you just have to jump right into roughly where you left it, but this really makes little difference because the sentences are all much the same anyway.

After a day or so of reading the book, I realised that I was coming back to it with a sense of mild depression, even dread.  I struggled on to the end but it got no better, and the ending, where Reger invites Atzbacher to see a play came as relief that something mildly positive might be happening.  However, the last words of the book, “the performance was terrible”  leaves the reader wondering what the point of it all is.

Indeed, the only point of such a book would be humour, but the occasional flashes of irony or sarcasm are sunk beneath the seemingly endless pages of bitter criticism.  Hell must be like this – a place where no light penetrates, and old men lament the pointlessness of existence for all eternity.  Eliot’s words in Little Gidding come to mind,

Ash on an old man’s sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.

For this story ends exactly like this – dust in the air of the museum, an old man lost in supreme negativity.  Why Bernhard though this book was worth writing I can’t imagine.  It would take a resilient spirit to be able to read it and not be pleased when it finishes.

Other reviews:

John Self has written on his blog Asylum a much more positive and erudite review of this book than I have

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?”

Clearly this is not going to be a simple business!

The Inheritance is an evolving story with many twists and turns. It doesn’t take much imagination to realise that the legal system in 1992 Caracas is complex, relying on who you know, and often with the possibility of “gifts” being necessary to help things along. Daniel finds that the wheels of justice grind very slowly, and even when he hires his own lawyers, he is by no means certain that they are as single-mindedly pursuing his interests as he would like.

Daniel and Kirshman are both Jewish but their shared faith only goes to complicate matters. There is a professed brotherhood between them due to their religion and a community of people in the synagogue who Daniel finds difficult get on his side. Everyone seems to want matters settled equably but it is not clear that they share the same views of who is in the right. It seems cut and dried to Daniel, but there are always other considerations that come in to muddy the waters.

Daniel’s Uncle was partly to blame of course. Through a series of flashbacks we read accounts of Daniel’s visits to his Uncle when he was in Europe, and is it clear that Uncle Alexander expected much more from Daniel than the two or three days he occasionally spent with him. Perhaps Julio Kirshman really was a better support in his latter years than his own family? Did Uncle Alexander appoint him for the sole reason of dangling a fortune before Daniel’s eyes and then making it so difficult for him to finalise his inheritance?

The complexity of the situation increases as the book goes on. Daniel finds weeks stretching into months, and he finds himself travelling to America and Panama to try to bring matters to a close. The stress begins to effect changes in Daniel’s personality, and the non-materialistic poet begins to finds that he is more interested in money than he had ever imagined.

I greatly enjoyed this book. It is complex, clever, and also funny. The reader is easily drawn into the labyrinthine processes of Venezuelan law where who you know is more important than the rights or wrongs of your case. It is as much about the psychology of greed as about the convoluted processes surrounding the inheritance. The author lets us embark on a long journey with Daniel and we find ourselves rooting for him while also seeing a bigger picture that he is largely blind to. The Inheritance is a vivid and colourful novel, satisfyingly complex and unlike many books, more interesting the further you get into it.

Book page on publishers website

Other blog reviews

The Truth About Lives
Winstonsdad’s Blog

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.

Christoph Hein

Bernard Haber, the ten year old son of a refugee carpenter arrives in the local school and is introduced to the class as an emigré from Poland.  The children notice his throaty Eastern accent and his cloth bag made from an old military coat and begin to treat him with the contempt which immigrants from the east attract.  Within a day or two however, Bernard has established himself as a tough character, well able to stand up for himself and he gains a sort of grudging acceptance, which follows him through his adult life, eventually enabling him to rise to prominence among the town’s administration.

Bernard’s life story is told through the eyes of a schoolmate, a girlfriend, a sister in law, an accomplice in smuggling people to the West, and a local business associate.   Each of these portraits describes a different phase of Bernard’s life, and the author manages to use Bernard’s life as a parallel the development of East Germany as it adapts to communist rule and eventually breaks free to join the West.

In the course of the book we learn much about life in East Germany.  The process of agricultural collectivisation is particularly painful, but the farmers who had their land confiscated found themselves in a nine-to-five job, with holidays and an old-age pension.  At least one of the farmer’s wives comments on the benefits of the new life, even though productivity is a fraction of what it was under the old system.  At one point Bernard takes a job as a driver for a gang of people-smugglers, transporting people to Berlin in a restored pre-war car, and later we read of his success in building a carpentry business of his own despite the difficulties of running private enterprise under a communist system.

When re-unification comes in 1990, Bernard and his business associates are well-placed to take-over previously state-run enterprises and Hein describes the way in which those who were quick off the mark could obtain massive bank-loans which would enable them to become owners of large companies and achieve a wealth undreamed of before.

The memory of the German Democratic Republic is fast-fading, and most people when they think of Germany today have a picture in their minds of a prosperous, modern nation much different to the Soviet republic of the East.  I enjoyed reading this book for the vivid impression it gives of a lost place and time, but can only feel relief for those who lived under the old regime that those days are now long gone.

Settlement is one of eight books which has been short-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award (IMPAC), the results of which will be announced in a few days time on 17 June.   Having looked at the list, I would think it has a reasonable chance of success, but Marilynne Robinson’s Home may be a strong contender (although I was not totally impresssed with it), and surely Zoe Heller’s The Believers stands a good chance.

Other reviews:

Lizzy Sidal
Kevin from Canada

The photograph of Christopher Hein is taken from the author’s website

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.

In the case of Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann, the obvious comparison is with fellow German writer Gert Hoffman who in 1994 published a fictionalised biography of German scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, a magnificent romp through the highlights of the highly eccentric scientist who courted and married a servant girl.  I am fairly sure that Daniel Kehlman would not mind the comparison because Lichtenberg makes cameo appearances in Measuring The World which are described in a very similar manner to the Hoffman book.  In fact, the style of the two books is so similar, I almost feel that Hoffman was Kehlmann’s main inspiration.

The point about these books is that they are novels first and foremost and don’t really pretend to be otherwise.  I found Measuring the World to be highly entertaining, and I feel that it has is sufficient authenticity to be described as “good enough” to give the readers a worthwhile insight into the lives of the scientists Alexander von Humbolt and Carl Friederich Gauss.  I do not have a scientific background and frankly I would have been unlikely to have read anything about these two 18/19th century Germans if I had not stumbled across this book.  What I did find was a dramatic account of the way that scientists and geographers developed the means to take accurate measurements of distances, depths and heights using techniques such as triangulation and barometric and magnetic measurements.

Von Humbolt made extensive travels in South and Latin America and Daniel Kehlman successfully (as far as I can tell) captures the adventures they had along the way (I assume the author made use of the over 20 volumes of written accounts that Humbolt left of his journeys).  Von Humbolt is portrayed as a man totally dedicated to his science, which could make for a rather mono-chrome novel.  However,  Kehlman makes dramatic use of Humbolt’s rather more colourful travelling companion Aimé Bonpland.  While Bonpland is a determined explorer, he is a much more “human” figures whose moral failings provide a hilarious counterpoint to Humbolt’s asceticism.  Kehlman capture the incredible dangers of their 1750 mile  journey up the Amazon in order to find the Casiquiare canal joining the great river with the Orinoco river system.

The single-mindedness of the two explorers is quite incredible.  No terrain is too difficult for them to explore, even to the extent of climbing mountains so high that they hallucinate due to the lack of oxygen in the atmosphere.  Torrential rain-storms capsize their boat and they are left stranded in on the banks of deep and dangerous forests.  They encounter tribes of indigenous people who use poisoned darts – and learn from them the secrets of the manufacture of the poison, curare.  They meet wild animals galore including crocodiles and jaguars and it seems to be only by luck that they escape from forming a tasty meal for these creatures.

Meanwhile back in Germany, we read about Carl Friedrich Gauss, the “Prince of Mathematicians”.  Again, having no mathematical background myself, I can only say that Kehlmann succeeds in making the incomprehensible at least a little accessible to me, and also reminds me that a mathematical brain is a gift denied to most people.   While at school, his teacher fills a gap in the lesson by asking his pupils to add the number 1 to 100 together, a task which young Gauss achieves in seconds.

In later years Gauss was able to calculate the movements of the obscurest planets and predict when they appear, using logarithms (for which he needed no books of tables, having worked them out in his head).   But Kehlmann does not just tell his reader about the mathematical Gauss.  We learn of his courtship and marriage to his beloved Johanna (who seemed able to tolerate his jumping out of bed during the first night of their marriage to jot down some notes of a formula that just came into his head).  Alas, Johanna died in childbirth leaving Gauss bereft for the rest of his life, despite a later marriage.

I have to say, I enjoyed this book greatly.  I accept that it is not wholly historically accurate but having read it, I feel that I have definitely got a good impression of these scientists and the type of life they led.  The book is in many ways an entertaining romp, with some outlandish adventures along the way.  But there is also enough science to make me feel that I’ve actually learned something I didn’t know before.  The book reminds me of the incredible sacrifices that these people made to make important discoveries which became the foundations of much later science.  The phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants” comes to mind, and I at least am grateful to Daniel Kehlmann for providing all this information in such an entertaining way.

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.

Despite initial hardship, the family prosper in Vienna and another generation takes the stage, as prosperous clothing retailers.  We read their stories and hear how they bicker and fight, but remain united in the face of increasing anti-Jewish feeling during the 1930s.  By this time, the narrator is a young man, and manages to escape out of Austria into Belgium where he manages to get on one of the last ships taking Jewish émigrés to London.  This is very much the author’s own story,for the book is at least partly autobiographical.

In the second-half of the book, the narrator describes a lengthy episode in the 1930s when his father and his father’s brother were in dispute over their joint business enterprise.  Eichner reproduce pages of correspondence between the two men, showing the extreme bitterness which led them to break up their business.  The wrangling and personal attacks reached a terrible pitch causing the family to try to intervene.  Alas, the two men could not be reconciled and a terrible tragedy occurred as a result.

There is much Jewish-related content throughout the book.  Hans Eichner frequently digresses from his narrative to tell Jewish stories and jokes and to tell folk-lorish tales of encounters with rabbis and ancestors.  He also keeps flashing forward to describe the narrator’s own situation as a veterinary surgeon in modern-day Haifa.  These interruptions to the narrative show how a family is linked across the generations by its own culture and its own saga, with people from earlier generations still influencing events in the present.

In the final section of this book we read of the narrtor’s life after the war-years as an academic in Canada.  He taught German, speaking with his students “about Goethe and Holderlin, about Keller and Storm, about Kafka, Thomas Mann and Brecht, but never about the Holocaust”.  With increasing realisation of his ignorance of this subject he went to the library and began to read.  Within a few days he had appalling stomach pains and “images of horror pursued me into sleep until I hardly dared to go to bed any more”.

When he finally stopped reading the Holocaust literature, the narrator realised that he had hardly done a thing while these dreadful events were taking place other than to live a life of pleasure and sleep with his girlfriends.  A realisation dawned on him that he had to be part of the new state of Israel and to serve it in a productive way. An idea comes to him to re-train as a veterinarian and to emigrate to Israel to look after the livestock, and before long he has enrolled on a five year course to achieve his aim.

I am pleased that I was able to read this book and can say that it sits well among other books describing this period by authors such as Thomas Mann or Stefan Zweig.  It is a very “European” book and I would say that is is an useful contribution to an understanding of what mid-20th century persecution meant for Jewish-European families.  Despite its fictional form, the author explains that he ended up writing a novel, although “there is little in it that didn’t actually happen”.  The freedom of the novel form and the use of the narrator’s voice has brought the book to life far more than would have been possible if he had simply recounted these events as they happened.