Tag Archives: Novel

Andrea Maria Schenkel: Bunker (2009)

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It had been a normal day at work. Monika was locking up, ready to head home, when the man arrived. She didn’t see his fist until it was far too late. Bundled into a car, tied up and taken in darkness to an old mill in the thick of a forest, she has been flung into a bunker. It is only now, as time passes and she sees her attacker in the light, that she notices the startling resemblance to someone from her very dark and buried past. Someone she never wanted to see again.

Andrea Maria Schenkel entered the literary crime scene with a big bang when her first novel  The Murder Farm – Tannöd was published in Germany. Based on a true story it described a crime which wiped out a whole family. While there were many glowing reviews there were also a lot who predicted she would be a one hit wonder. Fact is, she has written three more novels, two very different ones, Ice Cold – Kalteis and Bunker – Bunker, and a fourth one which hasn’t been translated yet – Finsterau -, which is written in the vein of Tannöd, but none has had the success of the first.

Bunker is a very unusual crime novel. It takes a long time to figure out what is going on as the POV occasionally changes two to three times per page. If the different points of view were not printed in different type, it would be nearly impossible to know who is telling the story. If you are an impatient person you might give up after a few pages. I decided to read until the end and must say, I don’t regret it. Instead of passively reading about the confusion of the victim, we share this confusion which was an interesting experience.

Monika is abducted from her work place, tied up, thrown into a car and driven to a mill in a dark forest. A bunker belongs to the mill and she is held captive there. The man hits and mishandles her but what he really wants is not clear.

After some time she feels she knows him. It seems to be someone she never wanted to see again and who was tied to the disappearance of her brother when she was still a teenager.

The relationship between Monika and her attacker changes constantly. While he hits her one moment, he takes care of her the next. At one point she has a chance to escape but she stays.

At the end of the book a murder has been committed, a person has been severely injured and another one escapes. That’s all I’m telling you.

I liked this puzzle approach, I found it interesting to only ever get a few snippets of information which only formed a whole after I had finished the book. The main story line ends in a satisfying way but there is a lot of back story which is never really sorted out. There are too many open questions at the end. I don’t aways mind being left with unanswered questions if I think, the author withheld answers despite the fact that he/she had them. When I feel it was an easy way out for the author, I’m not impressed. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that this is what happened here.

Bunker is a quick read, offers an interesting narrative technique but I’m still not sure whether it is not rather a gimmick than a great book.

Zoran Drvenkar: Tell Me What You See – Sag mir, was du siehst (2002) German YA Fantasy Thriller

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Zoran Drvenkar was born in Croatia in 1967 and moved to Berlin with his parents at the age of three. He is the author of far over 30 books for children, young adults and adults. His gritty thriller for adults Sorry and the fantasy thriller Tell Me What You See – Sag mir, was du siehst are the only books available in English so far. I’ve read a collection of short stories a couple of years ago and really liked it. I thought he is the perfect choice for genre week.

Tell Me What You See was very different from the other book I read by him and very different from anything I ever read. Some call him the Neil Gaiman of German literature (a title that Christoph Marzi holds as well).  After having read this novel I have to say, it’s not a good comparison. He is very different.

If you look at the German cover below you get the perfect feel of this book. It has very strong imagery and a mysterious story. The book starts during Christmas night. Sixteen year old Alissa and her best friend Evelin wander around the snow-covered graveyard, in the middle of the night. It’s icy cold and they are looking for Alissa’s father’s grave like every Christmas. He died in an accident a few years ago and Alissa cannot get over it. While looking for the grave, Alissa falls into an open crypt, discovers the coffin of a small child and a mysterious plant growing out of that coffin. Something urges her to rip out the plant and eat it.

From that moment on things get strange and scary. Alissa sees figures nobody else sees, she notices ravens all over the town, her former boyfriend Simon starts stalking her. What she doesn’t know is that ingesting a magical plant like this is deadly for the wrong host.

If you want to know whether she will survive or join her father, what those figures are and discover the secret of the plant, you have to read the book. The answers and the ending is a bit sad and quite unexpected.

I loved reading this book, I liked the imagery so much and found the story suspenseful. I didn’t care so much for the language though. It’s very rude in places, especially in the parts written in Simon’s POV.

Tell Me What You See is very evocative and atmospherical, a perfect read for this time of the year. If you like snow, graveyards, ravens, old dilapidated villas and ghosts, this is a must read for you.

I have to add that I was a bit taken aback by the explicit references to sex, especially since this is a book for the age group 12+. Clearly there are other rules for German YA novels. I have no children but I asked someone if they would think it is OK for their twelve-year-old child to read about blowjobs and other explicit things. The answer, as I had expected, was no. I just thought I’d let you know if you consider buying this as a Christmas gift for a younger person.

Vishy and I decided to read this book together. You can find his review here. It’s worth having a look as he included many beautiful quotes from the book.

Bernhard Schlink: The Weekend – Das Wochenende (2008)

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Old friends and lovers reunite for a weekend in a secluded country home after spending decades apart. They plumb their memories of each other and pass quiet judgements on the life decisions each has made since their youth. This isn’t, however, just any old reunion, and their conversations of the old days aren’t typical reminiscences. After 24 years, Joerg – a convicted murderer and terrorist, is released from prison on a pardon. 

Bernhard Schlink Week, hosted by Judith (Reader in the Wilderness), is part of German Literature Month. We had the option to choose either a literary  or one of the crime novels. I opted for the first. I have read The Reader a few years ago and liked it. It’s well-written, carefully constructed, thought-provoking and suspenseful. No wonder it was a bestseller. It took me a while to decide which of his novels I should read. Since I’m interested in the history of the RAF (Red Army Fraction), I felt like reading The Weekend – Das Wochenende which tells the story of Jörg, former terrorist, who is amnestied by the president, after 20 years in prison. To ease him into this transition his sister Christiane, invited the old friends to her house in the country, to spend a weekend together.

Family weekends or holidays are tropes I love because they often manage to look under the surface; taken out of their daily lives and put together, people clash and reveal their carefully hidden and often ugly feelings. To choose this setting for the homecoming of his protagonist wasn’t a bad choice but the way it was written was awfully bad. While there were a few scenes I liked and although it was a quick read, the melodramatic tone, the trite symbolism – the book starts on Friday and ends on Sunday with a “redemptive” scene in which everyone helps to carry buckets of water which flooded the cellar after a torrential rain (hello, heavy-handed allusion) – just didn’t do it for me. Add cancer, a budding love story between two elderly people who don’t need to fall in love as they are mature and therefore can skip the intro – read – jump into bed without the nervous fussing  – …

What’s really bad is that this is a book about terrorism. A terrorism which was a reaction to Germany’s post-war attempts at forgetting the past and leaving the old Nazis in prominent places. A terrorism which protested against imperialism, bigotry and hypocrisy. While initially in her first wave the RAF didn’t want to harm or kill people, the second wave became much more aggressive and violent and didn’t shy away from murder. Jörg is exemplary of this second wave. But nothing is shown, or discussed. There are just people with opinions, sitting together, eating and discussing. Each character serves as a vehicle expressing the one or the other opinion on terrorism.

The German newspaper critics hated this book. The readers on amazon like it. I don’t always agree with critics but in this case I have to. This is a book written like a corny genre novel and the only thing interesting about it is the topic but it’s not treated well. I don’t know any more than before reading it. Jörg says that there was a war on and that it was normal that people got killed in a war. On the other hand he is crying over getting old and being ill…. A sentimental man who pretends he doesn’t care that he killed people? That doesn’t work for me.

The book was published in 2008, just half a year after Brigitte Mohnhaupt was amnestied, while Christain Klar was not. It’s ok to be topical in novels but this book makes me think Schlink wanted to exploit something.

At the end of the year we write our Best of lists. I always add one or two worst of books, books that I found so bad that in some cases they infuriated me. The Weekend will be on the list. It’s insufferably botched.

Ray Bradbury: The Halloween Tree (1972)

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ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT, eight trick-or-treaters gather at the haunted house by the edge of town, ready for adventure. But when Something whisks their friend Pip away, only one man, the sinister Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud, can help the boys find him.

It’s been such a long time since I’ve read my last Ray Bradbury novel. When I was a teenager I devoured almost all of his books. The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man. There were only two of the major novels I haven’t read, one of which is Fahrenheit 451 (yes, I know, a huge omission) and the other one The Halloween Tree.

I hadn’t been thinking of Bradbury that much until I read that he has died this year. If this hadn’t happened I might not have felt like picking one of his novels right now. The Halloween Tree has been on my TBR pile for a long time and it’s almost the end of October; it seemed like a good final choice for R.I.P. VII.

The first thing that struck me was how original and descriptive his writing is. I re-read so many of the sentences, I suppose I already read the whole book twice. It is full of passages and sentences like these

And it was the afternoon of Halloween. And all the houses shut against a cool wind. And the town was full of cold sunlight.
But suddenly, the day was gone. Night came out from under each tree and spread.

The wind outside nested in each tree, prowled the sidewalks in invisible treads like unseen cats.

On the night of Halloween eight boys in costumes gather to go trick-or-treating. One of their friends, Pipkin, isn’t ready yet and tells them to go and wait for him, outside of the town, near a well-known haunted house.

Until they stood at last by a crumbling wall, looking up and up and still farther up at the great tombyard top of the old house. For that’s what it seemed. The high mountain peak of the mansion was littered with what looked like black bones or iron rods, and enough chimneys to choke out smoke signals from three dozen fires on sooty hearths hidden far below in dim bowels of this monster place. With so many chimneys, the roof seemed a vast cemetery, each chimney signifying the burial place of some old god of fire or enchantress of steam, smoke, and firefly spark. even as they watched, a kind of bleak exhalation of soot breathed up out of some four dozen flues, darkening the sky still more, and putting out some few stars.

They wait but Pipkin doesn’t show up. Instead a mysterious man shows an takes them on a journey through history, starting with ancient Egypt at the time of the construction of the pyramids, from there he takes them to the Celts, to medieval Paris, the Europe of the witch hunts and finally Mexico on the Día des los muertos. Their trip, which they undertake on broomsticks, is an introduction to the secrets and history of Halloween, its meaning, its source, the way it changed through the ages until it became the almost meaningless contemporary trick-or-treating custom. Their journey introduces them not only to the secrets of Halloween but to Death, the source of it all. And while they follow the man from one time period to the next, enchanted, thrilled and a little scared, the boy Pipkin appears in different forms. At the end it looks as if this hadn’t only been an exploration but that the journey was an attempt to free their friend of the claws of Death who already tried to grab him.

The book is an exhilarating wonderful ride. It’s fantastic and enchanting and I loved reading it. The writing is wonderful. I’m glad I rediscovered an author I had almost forgotten. Reading Ray Bradbury so shortly after Neil Gaiman, I would say that he, like so many others, must have been heavily influenced by Bradbury.

Which Is your favourite Ray Bradbury book?

The review of The Halloween Tree is a contribution to Carl’s R.I.P. VII Challenge. Don’t miss to visit the review site.

Tim Parks: Loving Roger (1986)

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Tight and disturbing, Loving Roger begins with a dead body and a chilling question. Why has nice, ordinary, affectionate Anna picked up her kitchen knife and murdered the man she insists she loves?…This brief novel is a mordantly illuminating essay on the way love contains the seeds of vindictiveness and hatred.

A while back in a discussion Max from Pechorin’s Journal mentioned Loving Roger as an excellent example for a book that explored the reasons for a murder rather than having us guess who did it. I was intrigued and since I had liked Tim Parks’ Rapids I got Loving Roger a while ago. I had totally forgotten about the book until last week when I was hunting for a short novel or novella.

The narrator of the story is Anna and here is how the book begins

Roger lay on my new blue rug in the corner by the television and the lamp that seemed it always had the funny orange bubbles rising in it that he hated. But I went to work as usual. I made myself the regular cheese and ham sandwich and took the baby up to Mrs Duckworth for the day and she didn’t notice anything odd about me, I dont’ think.

What a beginning. To pack such a lot of information in three sentences, grab the reader’s interest and start right in the middle of the story is masterful.

After this intense beginning, Anna rewinds and tells the story from its start; how she met Roger, how they started to have an affair, how she got pregnant and how she killed him. The story she tells is quite disturbing. At first because the way she describes Roger makes him look like a total bastard and we don’t understand why she stays with him. He works as executive in the company in which Anna has a job as a secretary. Most of the senior men in the company treat the young women shabbily. They think they are not only simple but simple-minded girls. While Roger hopes that this is just a temporary job before he will become a famous writer and sees himself as something better, in the way he treats Anna he is just as average and shabby as the other men. He believes she is below him and tells her so. But she is attractive and sexy and so they start their secret affair. Anna tells a lot of shocking details of their affair in a very candid voice. She describes how condescending Roger is, how he is ashamed of her, how he lies and betrays. But then, after a while, she adds bits and pieces of her own family history, tells how much her parents loved her late brother Brian, how she doesn’t count at all, and that is when we begin to understand that not only is she a unrealiable narrator but that she has serious issues of her own.

The further the novel progresses, the more it is like watching a train crash. What she tells about the way Roger treats her, his pompous monologues, the diary she finds in which he analyses his feeling and confesses his infidelity, added to her constant repeating of how much she loves him, is unsettling.

Although the novel seems to start with the end, that is actually not the case. The book offers a final twist that is quite unexpected. It’s one of those surprising endings which alone make the book worth reading. However, that’s not the only thing Loving Roger offers. Tim Parks writes with extreme accuracy. There is an episode in which Anna and Roger bathe in the middle of the night in a river in Cambridge and when they come out of the water Anna struggles to put on her clothes. This is such a small detail but the way he describes it, how the clothes get stuck on her wet body, was so well observed.

The central story of Anna and Roger is a story of passion and obsession and it’s not always clear who is the victim. A lesser author would have left it at that but Parks manages, in just a few pages, to paint not only the story of an obsession but of a very dysfunctional family too. The way Anna is treated by her parents is awful. Her brother was always the favourite, they didn’t even pretend otherwise and after his death, she is even less important. Strangely, I didn’t feel much for her, nor for Roger, I felt for their little child. Just imagine, what I life he will have.

I really enjoyed this slim novel. It’s admirably well written. It reminded me a bit of Jenn Ashworth’s A Kind of Intimacy or some of Ruth Rendell’s books although Tim Parks isn’t a crime writer.

Has anyone read this too or another Tim Parks novel? He has a new one out The Server which sounds interesting as well. I have his non-fiction account Teach Us To Sit Still on my TBR pile.

Antonio Tabucchi: Requiem. A Hallucination – Requiem. Uma alucinação (1991)

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A few years ago I was on a trip through Spain and stopped in Sevilla. It was the beginning of August and incredibly hot. Most Spanish cities have rivers but you wouldn’t know that if you visit in summer because they are dry. A very peculiar sight for someone from central Europe.  The heat was scorching and I was out sitting in a park, it was only 9 a.m. The park’s sprinklers were on and the moment the water hit the asphalt, it turned into mist. So not only was it hot but quite humid. I had not specific plans but just wandered the city and stopped in parks, bars, restaurants and spoke to people. I haven’t done a similar trip in two years but when I started reading Tabucchi’s Requiem. A Hallucination it was exactly like being on my own, without specific plans and just immersing myself in a new place. The place in this case wasn’t Sevilla or any other Spanish city but the capital of Portugal, Lisbon. It’s equally hot in the book as it was on my trip and this catapulted me back in time. I realize I’m writing a lot about myself instead of writing about Tabucchi but there is a reason. I’m trying to put into words why this author means so much to me, why I love his books although they often, like in this case, are rather descriptions of a quest than a real story. There is just something I can relate to on a deeper level than with most other authors.

Since I’ve just read more than one Tabucchi in a very short time, I was reminded of one of the major themes of his work – the quest. His characters,be it in Indian Nocturne or in Requiem, are always looking for someone. Sometimes the person is real, sometimes the person is just some sort of magnet which attracts the narrator but what he really is looking for is himself.

In Requiem the nameless narrator finds himself aimlessly wandering through the sweltering city of Lisbon. He thought he had an appointment with someone at midday but the person didn’t show up and so he’s left on his own for another twelve hours as the meeting will take place at midnight instead. The person the narrator will meet is the famous writer Fernando Pessoa.

The narrator seems to be dreaming with open eyes, no wonder, after all the book is subtitled “A Hallucination” and we follow him from the park to a bar, to the cemetery, to a restaurant, a hotel, an abandoned villa and finally to another restaurant where he will dine with Pessoa. On his meanderings through the hot summer city he will meet people who are dead already, people from his past, people who still exist and some who never existed.

While this may sound confusing, it isn’t because Tabucchi is a very descriptive writer and the book is more than anything else an homage to Lisbon and everything the city represents for Tabucchi. This includes the people, the food, the music, the atmosphere. As dreamlike as the story may be, it is on the other hand described in an amazingly realistic way and you have the feeling to be there and explore the city through the eyes and the other senses of the narrator. It is an atmospherical and sensual account at the same time.

It seems that one of the things Tabucchi must have liked the most about Portugal was the cuisine. He mentions numerous dishes and recipes in the book. It’s interesting because most of the dishes are poor people’s dishes. Things they cook with leftovers. A frequent ingredient is bread. I have never eaten Portuguese cuisine and to be entirely honest it’s not likely I will as they include a lot of ingredients which I do not eat but it’ still interesting and the way the food is described you can almost taste and smell it.

Requiem is a complex book and can be read in many different ways. To fully appreciate it, I would have to read it once more. There were a few things that struck me during a first reading. The love for Portugal and Lisbon, the quest-like search. The admiration for Pessoa. The mysteries and complexities of life. Memories, dreams, illusions.

What I liked best is that reading Requiem felt so much like exploring a city as a traveller not so much as a tourist. When I’m a tourist I might visit all the places you “have to see” but when I travel, I let the city guide me. The city and it’s people. There will always be someone in a foreign city who will show you something which is worth discovering. A hidden street, a secret corner, a bar to which only the natives go. It’s this type of exploration you will encounter in Requiem. It’s a book for those who do not mind getting lost, knowing very well that they find a world worth discovering on their way.

Tabucchi’s love of Portugal and Lisbon was so intense that he wrote this novel in Portuguese stating in the foreword that no other language, other than maybe Latin which he didn’t master, seemed appropriate.

Tabucchi mentions Portuguese music and this reminded me of the wonderful singer Misia and her fados. Her videos are all visually compelling. This one was directed by John Turturro.

While finishing the book I discovered that the book has been made into a movie by Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner. The movie is in French/Portuguese. I’ve attached it. You can watch the whole of it on YouTube. I’m not sure it exists with English subtitles but it’s possible.

Taichi Yamada: In Search of a Distant Voice – Toku no koe wo sagashite (1986)

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Last year I read Taichi Yamada’s Strangers and it was one of the best books I’ve read that year. It haunted me for weeks. The mood, the atmosphere, it was beautiful and sad at the same time. I knew that it wasn’t his first book but the first to be translated into English. There are two other of his novels available in English one of which is In Search of a Distant Voice.

Just like Strangers, Yamada’s older novel In Search of a Distant Voice is a ghost story. But what a peculiar ghost story. Tsuneo works as an immigration officer in Tokyo. This means he chases illegal immigrants, takes part in raids, arrests people and sends them back to their country. Early on in the novel we learn that he has complex emotions which he fights and tries to repress. Some of them are linked to his professional life, some to his personal, very lonely life and another part has something to do with an incident which lies back ten years and took place in Portland, Oregon.

At the opening of the novel, Tsuneo has to get up in the middle of the night and take part in a raid to arrest Bangladeshi immigrants on the outskirts of Tokyo near a cemetery.

First he was overcome by a sense of foreboding. A second self would realize this back-and-forth was just part of the program. And the he would notice that even this realization itself was part of a ritual he had performed many hundreds of times. He was used to holding back moods. Keeping his feelings suppressed. Today, too, everything was happening as it always did.

When he runs after one of the immigrants and wants to arrest the man in the cemetery he is suddenly overwhelmed by an intense feeling which he cannot define at first but seems to be of an intense sexual nature. Tsuneo is delighted and shocked at the same time about the intensity of this experience. Something, a ghost, he thinks has flooded him with his or her emotions. When he returns home that day, he starts to hear the voice of a woman who speaks to him. At first he thinks he is going mad but then he is sure the voice is outside and not inside of his head. And although nobody else hears her, she seems real. It’s like having a phone conversation, only with a ghost.

Tsuneo’s has a lot on his mind these days. He feels pity for those people he arrests and he is wary of the arranged marriage he has agreed to. He is not in love with the woman but she isn’t a bad choice. But the more the book progresses, the more Tsuneo talks to the invisible woman, the more absurd the arranged marriage seems to be. He has a hard time to suppress his feelings and during the engagement ceremony when everyone is performing meaningless gestures and speaking empty words he starts to laugh uncontrollably and in the end breaks down and cries.

There is too much, Tsuneo has never told anyone. What happened in Portland for example or why he even went there. He cannot talk to his fiancée about that nor about the voice but he opens up to that invisible woman and tells her everything, the whole tragic episode that happened in Portland.

More than a ghost story, this is the portrait of a man who, at only 29, has given up on his hopes and dreams, who has repressed all of his feelings but cannot cope anymore. It’s the story of a breakdown, an analysis of guilt, suppressed sexuality, loneliness and search for meaning. There is a moving scene in which Tsuneo tells his friend that his life is completely meaningless. The friend is quite affected and answers that if this was the case, then his life would be meaningless as well.

It’s a flawed book as the end of the ghost story is not as satisfying as in Strangers – and the book is certainly pale in comparison to Strangers – but it’s still a very interesting book.  There are many beautiful scenes and reflections and I don’t think I’ve read a lot of novels which dealt as powerfully with the two complementary themes “strangers” and “immigrants” as this book. I didn’t love it as much as Strangers but I liked it too.

There is a third book available in English I Haven’t Dreamt of Flying for a While which I’d like to read as well.

The review is a contribution to Bellezza’s Japanese Literature Challenge 6 and Carl’s R.I.P. VII.