Category Archives: Books

German Literature Recommendations – 20 German Novels You Must Read

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I’m planning on writing a few posts with recommendations  for Lizzy and my upcoming German Literature Month in November. While I will give my personal recommendations in another post, I chose to follow one of the most famous German critics for the classics and modern classics.

The notorious German critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (also called Literaturpapst aka Pope of Literature), who, for decades, made writers – praise from him would invariably lead to sales, a negative comment could ruin a career – edited a few years ago the so-called Canon of German Literature. While I don’t always agree with the foreign books he chooses to praise, I trust his judgement on German literature. Especially classics. His “Kanon der deutschen Literatur” has five parts. The first consists of 20 novels, the others are dedicated to short stories, poems, plays and essays.

As I suppose most people who will join us in November will go for novels, I chose to present Reich-Ranicki’s list of novels. There are a few I haven’t read but I got all of them and have at least read the initial pages. I think it’s a good choice and it is great that you can find German, Austrian and Swiss authors on it. I indicated whether or not the book is available in English or out of print (OOP).

  1. Johann Wolfgang Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther aka Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774) Germany
  2. Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Elective Affinities aka Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) Germany
  3. E. T. A. Hoffmann: The Devil’s Elixirs aka Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815/16) Germany
  4. Gottfried Keller: Green Henry aka  Der grüne Heinrich (1854/55) Switzerland
  5. Theodor Fontane: Frau Jenny Treibel (1892) Germany. Seems not available in English.
  6. Theodor Fontane: Effi Briest (1894/95) Germany
  7. Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks (1901) Germany
  8. Heinrich Mann: The Blue Angel aka Professor Unrat (1905) Germany, OOP
  9. Hermann Hesse: The Prodigy aka Unterm Rad (1906) Germany
  10. Robert Musil: The Confusions of Young Törless aka Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (1906) Austria
  11. Franz Kafka: The Trial aka Der Prozess (1914/15) Germany – Prague
  12. Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain aka Der Zauberberg (1924) Germany
  13. Alfred Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) Germany
  14. Joseph Roth: The Radetzky March aka Radetzkymarsch (1932) Austria
  15. Anna Seghers: The Seventh Cross aka Das siebte Kreuz (1942) Germany
  16. Heimito von Doderer: The Strudlhof Steps (The link included the translation of the first 79 pages)  aka Die Strudlhofstiege (1951) Austria. Seems not available.
  17. Wolfgang Koeppen: Pigeons on the Grass aka Tauben im Gras (1951) Germany
  18. Günter Grass: The Tin Drum aka Die Blechtrommel (1959) Germany
  19. Max Frisch: Montauk (1975) Switzerland. OOP
  20. Thomas Bernhard: Woodcutters aka Holzfällen (1984) Austria

Obviously there are authors and novels missing that I and others consider to be great, maybe in some cases greater than those included but you have to start somewhere. I think that Swiss author Robert Walser should have been mentioned. Many of my favourite authors have mostly written novellas and short stories and are therefore not included in this list. Some of them are Eduard von Keyserling, Theodor Storm, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Heinrich von Kleist, The Brothers Grimm and Arthur Schnitzler.

Be it as it may, the above mentioned list is a great starting point. The books vary a lot in style, length and themes.

My favourites are Effi Briest, The Elective Affinities, The Radetzky March and The Confusions of Young Törless. When it comes to Thomas Mann I liked everything but the book that impressed me the most was his Doctor Faustus, his most ambitious novel. Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull aka The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man is the most entertaining. I read a lot of Hesse. Personally I think Narziss und Goldmund aka Narcissus and Goldmund to be his best.

Did you read any of them? Which ones did you like?

Nicci French: Blue Monday (2011)

Posted in Books, Psychological Thriller by

I have read a few novels by Nicci French in the past and always thought they were very entertaining. Not the height of the psychological thriller realm but nicely paced and interesting. All of their (Nicci French is the pseudonym of a married couple writing together) novels are stand-alone thrillers. When I read that they had written the first book in a new series I was very interested to read it.

Blue Monday introduces psychotherapist Frieda Klein and Detective Chief Inspector Karlsson. I suppose we will see both of them again in the next novel but Frieda Klein is the more important character of the two.

One of the problems I have with a lot of the mainstream thrillers and crime novels is what I call “dodgy psychology”. You could also call it pseudo-psychology. This type of psychological explanation was the reason why I did not like Nesbø’s The Snowman. With Blue Monday we are on the same terrain but, funny enough, I liked it anyway. This is as much a thriller as a novel about London. The descriptions of the city are very well done. Another reason why I didn’t mind reading the book was that Frieda Klein is an appealing character. At the beginning of the novel she is just breaking up with someone because he will move to the States and she doesn’t want to follow him. She is deeply rooted in London and in her little house that feels like a den to her. Frieda  is a solitary person and likes to spend a lot of time on her own. Sometimes, plagued by insomnia, she will roam the silent streets of the big city at night. I liked these parts. She used to work in a clininc but has now her own practice.

A little boy is abducted in a way that reminds Detective Karlsson of another abduction twenty years ago. At the same time a man is seeing Frieda because he is suffering of panic attacks and nightmares. The nightmares circle around a little boy whose description reminds Frieda of the one who has been abducted. Frieda cannot put her finger on it but she has a feeling that there is a connection. She reports what she has found out to the police who do not belive her in the beginning.

I’m not going to write anything more about the story, the reader knows soon enough in what direction it goes (another weakness of the book, by the way). Frieda and Karlsson will work very closely together from then on. If you want to find out who abducted the little boy and whether they will find him alive, you will have to read the book.

As I said, despite it’s flaws I found Blue Monday readable because I liked Frieda and the descriptions of London. I’m often not interested in the mystery or the solution to it and enjoy all sorts of other aspects in crime novels and thrillers but if you are someone who loves a mystery, stay away from this book. The solution is very lame, to say the least, and the explanations are far from convincing. The end however is surprising.

This was my fourth and last book contribution to  Carl’s R.I.P. VI challenge. I’m still joining the group read and have planned on doing a post for Peril on the Screen. If you want to visit the review site, you can find it here.

Literature and War Readalong October 28 2011: The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

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lotus-eaters

Tatjana Soli’s The Lotus Eaters is another novel on the war in Vietnam that has received a lot of positive reviews. It cannot be called a classic as it only came out last year. So of all the books of this readalong it is by far the most recent. I really don’t know all that much about it and will therefore just add the blurb that should help you decide whether you’d like to read along or not.

As the fall of Saigon begins in 1975, two lovers make their way through the streets, desperately trying to catch one of the last planes out. Helen Adams, a photojournalist, must leave behind a war she has become addicted to and a devastated country she loves. Linh, her lover, must grapple with his own conflicting loyalties to the woman from whom he can’t bear to be parted, and his country.

Betrayal and self-sacrifice follows, echoing the pattern of their relationship over the war-torn years, beginning in the splendour of Angkor Wat, with jaded, cynical, larger-than-life war correspondent Sam Darrow, Helen’s greatest love and fiercest competitor, driven by demons she can only hope to vanquish.

Spurred on by the need to get the truth of the war out to an international audience, and the immense personal cost this carries, Sam and Helen’s passionate and all-consuming love is tested to the limit. This mesmerising novel carries resonance across contemporary wars with questions of love and heart-breaking betrayal interwoven with the conflict.

After having been so impressed by Tim O’Brien’s book I think I will explore more literature on the war in Vietnam in the future and I’m looking forward to read Soli’s novel.

Wednesdays are wunderbar – Effi Briest Group Read Giveaway

Posted in Books, German Literature by

Today we are kicking off the Wednesdays are wunderbar series which will be dedicated to giveaways. As Effi Briest is one of our readalong titles this is the first book that is given away.

The actual giveaway takes place on Lizzy’s blog. So if you are interested in winning Effi Briest and taking part in the readalong, please head over via this link and leave a comment.

Don’t miss reading one of the most wonderful German novels. With a bit of luck, you get the book version for free but you could also download it. You will find the details and more information on the readalong on Lizzy’s page.

Taichi Yamada: Strangers – Ijin-tachi to no Natsu (1987)

Posted in Books, Japan, Novel by

A disconcerting, yet deeply satisfying novel: a wonderful study of grief and isolation, a moving expression of our longing for things we have lost and are unable to have again.

I’ve read about Strangers last year on Novroz’ blog (here is the review) and wanted to read it ever since. It’s a ghost story and as such a perfect choice for Carl’s R.I.P. challenge. But it is also so much more than just a ghost story. It’s a truly wonderful book with a haunting atmosphere, a melancholy depiction of solitude and loneliness with a surprisingly creepy ending.

I often think that the problem some people have with ghost stories is that they take them literally and if they do not believe in the possibility of an afterlife, they do not want to read them. But ghost stories can also be read as purely symbolical. Loneliness, longing and grief can affect a person deeply. Lonely children often start to talk with imaginary friends and also older people can start to talk to themselves which is actually rather a conversation with someone who is not present than a discussion with oneself.

I used to live in a huge apartment building for a while and remember that it could feel strange being awake at night when everyone else was obviously sleeping. All the lights were turned off, there were no noises. Coming home at night and seeing the building from afar, like a big ocean liner, with all the lights on, was also quite special.

Strangers starts in a building just like that. A huge apartment building on Tokyo’s noisy Route 8 where constant traffic keeps you awake and the density of the exhaust fumes forbids the opening of the windows. Most of the apartments are offices. Harada, a fortysomething TV script writer, has stranded here after his divorce. At first he can hardly sleep. The traffic noise is overpowering but after a few weeks he gets used to it. One night, despite the noise outside, he feels an intense loneliness. It seems as if he was the only person in this big building.  He finds out that there is only one other person, a woman, staying at the house at night. Everyone else leaves the place and lives somewhere else.

One night the woman, Kei, knocks on his door and wants to drink a bottle of champagne with Harada but he refuses. He regrets it and invites her a few days later. She is a beautiful woman but with a terrible burn mark where her breasts should be. While they start dating, Harada visits Asakusa, the downtown district in which he used to live with his parents. His parents died when he was very young. He never returned to the place but all of a sudden something attracts him magically. Many of the houses have been destroyed and replaced by modern ugly buildings. While walking around Harada meets a man who looks exactly like his dead father at the time of his death. He follows him to his house and there is his mother, she too is still young and looking exactly like she did before she died.

Harada knows that he shouldn’t return to see his parents but he cannot help himself. He has to go back again and again. His friends start to tell him that he is looking bad. Kei wants him to stop seeing them. He can’t and we understand why.

Something closely akin to the wonderful sense of security I’d felt at such times as a child had descended on me that night in Asakusa. I coul recall no such moments in all the years since my parents had died.

Yamada managed to write a ghost story that is at the same time an eerie tale and a realistic portrayal of loneliness, grief and the search for a meaning in life. Harada is at a turning point in his life. He has a hard time finding jobs, his wife got most of his money after the divorce, his son doesn’t want to see him, most women are not interested in a man like him. Falling in love with Kei seems not so much a choice as inevitable. They are both scarred in different ways. Meeting his dead parents is what infuses his days with meaning and warmth until he starts to pay a prize for it.

What did it amount to, anyway, this life I led? Busying myself with random tasks that popped up one after another, enjoying the moments of excitement each little sir brought before it receded into the distance, yet accumulating no lasting store of wisdom from any of it.

Strangers is an excellent ghost story and a melancholic depiction of the loneliness that living in a big city like Tokyo can bring. I really loved this book. I could hardly put it down and at the same time I didn’t want it to end.

German Literature Month November 2011 – The Participants

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This is just a quick update to let you know I’ve added a new page to the top of my blog in which you can find the names and blog addresses of the participants of our German Literature Month. There are some more who have no blog, they have not been forgotten and are as appreciated as the others.

The list is the same as the one you can find below. All those who have been highlighted have reviewed a considerable amount of German books or already done an introductory post. You might want to visit them to find something to read and review in November. If I have forgotten or not highlighted someone, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail and I will include it as soon as possible. The list will be updated on a regular basis. Please also let us know when you do an introduction or anything else, I will include it. It might help others to find reading suggestions.

AS OF NOVEMBER 1 2011 THE LINKS TO PEOPLE’S POSTS WILL BE ADDED ON THE GERMAN LITERATURE MONTH PAGE BUT I STILL ADD THE BLOGS 

1morechapter – Michelle

50 Year Project – TBM

A Book Sanctuary – Tracey

A Common Reader – Tom C Effi Briest Review

A Hot Cup of Pleasure – Neer Introduction

Andrew Blackman – Andrew Blackman

Ardent Reader – Christina

A Work in Progress – Danielle Announcement, Introduction with 13 choices

Beauty is a Sleeping Cat – Caroline

Book Around the Corner – Emma – Introduction with choices

BookeyWookey – ted

Books Without Any Pictures – Grace – Introduction

Caravana de Recuerdos – Richard

Ceri

chasing bawa – sakura

Curious Incidents in the North East – Katie Introduction

Dr Ruth Martin – Ruth Martin

Dr. K  – ludogutten

Everybookhasasoul – Sara Introduction with choices

Farm Lane Books – Jackie Introduction

His Futile Preoccupations – Guy Savage Introduction with choices

in lieu of a field guide – Rise – Introduction with choices and links to older posts

Iris on Books – Iris

Leben, Kochen, Bier u. Fussball – Harvey

Leroyhunter

Lizzy’s Literary Life – Lizzy Siddal

Mar gheall ar a léim – Eibhlin – Introduction

Polychrome Interest – Novroz

Reader in the Wilderness – Judith Introduction with choices

Read, Ramble – Fay – Introduction with proposed reading

Rikki’s Teleidoscope – Rikki – Introduction

seraillon – Scott W.

sub rosa – Sigrun Introduction with choices, Preparations on Handke, Who is Thomas Bernhard?

Susanna

Susie Bookworm – Susanna P

Tabula Rasa – Priya Introduction with possible choices

The Argumentative Old Git  – Himadri

The Children’s War – Alex Baugh

The Parrish Lantern – Parrish

The Reading Lives – Mel u

Time’s Flow Stemmed – Anthony – Introduction and reading plans,  Introduction Part II

Tony’s Reading List – Tony  Introduction with choices

Tortoisebook – Liz

Vishy’s Blog – Vishy Introduction with choices

Who Killed Lemmy Caution? – Daryl – Introduction

Winstonsdad’s Blog – Stu Introduction with list and reading plans

Wuthering Expectations – Amateur Reader (Tom)  –Introduction with choices focusing on plays

AS OF NOVEMBER 1 2011 THE LINKS TO PEOPLE’S POSTS WILL BE ADDED ON THE GERMAN LITERATURE MONTH PAGE

Tim O’Brien: The Things They Carried (1990) Literature and War Readalong September 2011

Posted in American Literature, Books, Novel, Readalong, Review by

A sequence of stories about the Vietnam War, this book also has the unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme. It aims to summarize America’s involvement in Vietnam, and her coming to terms with that experience in the years that followed.

I expected The Things They Carried to be a very good book. A very good book about the war in Vietnam. What I found is not only an outstanding book about the war in Vietnam but also about the art of storytelling. I’m really impressed. I don’t normally rely so heavily on quotes but in this case, I think, the author is the best person to give an accurate impression of his excellent writing.

But this too is true: stories can save us. I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive. And Ted Lavender, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and a slim young man I killed, and several others whose bodies I once lifted and dumped into a truck. They’re all dead. But in a story which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world. (…) The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.

The Things They Carried is told in interwoven stories. They are linked through the characters who return in most of them and through the common themes of war and storytelling. Each of the tales shows another way of telling a story or looks at an episode from another angle. Some are explicitly written by a writer for his readers only, they have never been told before. Some describe how the soldiers tell each other stories of what happened while they were separated or how they keep on retelling the same stories over and over again. Telling these stories gives meaning and is also liberating and healing. Those who cannot tell stories, those who are shut up by what they saw, those are bad off.

What is so fascinating about this book is that you can just read it like a series of linked episodes or you can read each episode as an attempt to tell the story another way.

One of the most powerful chapters is certainly the first, the one that gave the book its title. Through the enumeration of the things the soldiers carry, we get to know the soldiers, we sense that some of them will die and some will be wounded. As we learn later many of the young men O’Brien served with and who are introduced too us in this first chapter, die. Some through enemy fire, some in accidents. Some deaths are heroic, others are ridiculous, like Kiowa’s who got shot and then suffocated in a field full of shit. What impressed me in this story is the description of the stress, the weight they had to lift, the endless walking.

They moved like mules. By daylight they took sniper fire, at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost.

We learn a lot about the feeling of having been in a war and in this particular war. We hear about the state of mind of the soldiers and what war did to them. There are some chapters that made me feel uncomfortable like the one of a young soldier’s girlfriend who stayed with them a few weeks, joined the Green Berets and ultimately disappeared in the night, swallowed by the war. She got addicted to the feeling of danger and the heightened sense of being alive that went with it. This is fascinating and also unsettling.

I have read other accounts of men who went to war, I know my own father’s stories but they sound different which leads me to the conclusion that some experiences were typical for the soldier in Vietnam.

The average age in our platoon, I’d guess, was nineteen or twenty, and as a consequence things often took on a curiously playful atmosphere, like a sporting event, at some exotic reform school. The competition could be lethal, yet there was a childlike exuberance to it all, lots of pranks and horseplay.

At the end of the book you have the whole story of Tim O’Brien’s time in Vietnam. From the day when he got the letter that informed him that he was drafted, to the first days in Vietnam, all through the weeks that passed, all the things that happened, the friends he found, the friends he lost and how he ended up feeling like an outcast because he was sent away from his company after he was wounded and had to do some light duty in another camp. Maybe not all of this is true, as O’Brien writes, but a lot of what is made up is closer to what really happened than that what is just the plain unadorned truth.

Here is my favourite quote:

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

The Things They Carried is fascinating and powerful. Writing at its very best.

I hope others have read it as well and liked it as much. I would also like to hear how it compares to Matterhorn.

Other reviews

Anna (Diary of an Eccentric)

Danielle (A Work in Progress)

Silver Season