Tag Archives: Novel

Vicki Baum: Grand Hôtel – Menschen im Hotel (1929)

Posted in Austria, Austrian Literature, Books by

Vicki Baum was an Austrian novelist most famous for her Berlin novel Grand Hôtel aka Menschen im Hotel published in 1929. Although this book made her one of the early bestselling novelists and is still widely read in German it seems a bit difficult to find English copies. But since her far lesser known book Life and Death in Bali has just been reissued I hope that her other books, especially Grand Hôtel, will be republished as well. In any case, it is possible to find used copies. Part of the long-lasting success of the novel comes from the fact that it was made into a movie starring Greta Garbo Grand Hôtel (1932) and later into a German movie Menschen im Hotel (1959) starring Michèle Morgan and Heinz Rühmann. Vicki Baum wrote far over 50 novels, 10 of which have been made into movies.

Grand Hôtel is set in a luxurious hotel in Berlin between the wars. It’s walls shelter a microcosm of German society. The novel draws a panorama of the society and the times, reading it is fascinating and gives a good impression and feel for the time and the people. Vicki Baum includes a wide range of characters, the porter who waits for his wife to give birth to the first child, the aristocratic head porter Rohna, the many drivers and maids as well as some very interesting guests. Including the employees of the hotel gives the book a bit of an upstairs-downstairs feel and permits insight into the lives of the “simple people” who earn just enough not to starve.

The main characters are the guests. Dr. Otternschlag is the first to be introduced and he will also be the one closing this novel as he is almost part of the establishment. He stays here year in and year out, sits in the lobby and does nothing much. Badly wounded in Flanders, half of his face is just a scarred mass with a glass eye, he has lost interest in life. Wherever he goes his little black suitcase travels with him. The suitcase is packed for his final trip. It contains a large amount of morphine vials which he intends to inject should he be finally too disgusted by life. For the time being, he endures living but eases it with a regular nightly shot.

The Russian ballet dancer Grusinskaja is another important character. She is an aging beauty who is less and less successful. Her dancing lacks spirit and the public punishes her by leaving the theater almost before the final curtain. Once the lover of a Russian aristocrat, she is now still admired for her looks but not many fall in love with her. She reminded me of Gloria Swanson in the movie Sunset Boulevard or Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire.

The astonishingly handsome Baron von Gaigern is one of the most joyful characters. He is easy-going, always happy, a womanizer and a con artist. Nobody knows that all he has left is his title and that he is without any financial means. He too was in Flanders but apart from a tiny scar on his chin he seems unharmed.

The industrialist Preysing has come to the hotel for an important meeting. If the business men he will meet, will not sign the contract, he is done.

And there is the terminally ill accountant Kringelein, one of the many employees of Preysing.  Kringelein hasn’t done much else than save money all his life. He has never treated himself to anything and now, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, he has left his wife in some little provincial town and travelled to Berlin to spend all his savings and to finally live.

Flämmchen (little Flame) is Preysing’s temporary secretary. She is very young, as good-looking as Baron von Gaigern, good-natured but without much luck. Because she can’t find work, she started to model and sells her company to business men.

During the course of three days these people meet and interact. Some fall in love, some help each other, one kills one of them and at the end it’s not entirely clear who is a winner and who is a loser.

The character portraits are the strength of this novel. And the variety of themes. I was amazed about the range. It isn’t only about aging, the loss of success and fraud, but it also shows the aftermath of WWI. The war has left its mark on the people, their faces and their souls and changed the society forever. These people are very frivolous and venal. The meaning of life for them equals having a good time. If you want to have a good time you need money. And so another of the central themes is money. There is a whole chapter in which Preysing and his consultant discuss how they want to raise the value of the stocks of Preysing’s factory. What they do to achieve it, sounds so modern.

It’s interesting that the characters can be divided into two diametrically opposed groups. One group embraces life fully and greedily while the other one is weary and suicidally tired of it.

When you read a novel like Grand Hôtel that isn’t only set in the 20s but has been written at the time, you see the whole difference of a historical novel and one that depicts it’s time. Vicki Baum has an insider’s knowledge that is hard to achieve through research. I would really recommend this novel to anyone interested in the era, to those, like me, who love novels set in hotels and to all those who like a character driven story.

I would be very interested to know if anyone has read this one or any of her other novels. The way she described the society of the 20s is a very anthropological one. I’m not surprised, after reading it, that Life and Death in Bali was suggested reading at university in a course on Balinese culture. Our professor said the book was so well written that it was as good as non-fiction in its detailedness and exact observation.

The review is part of German Literature Month – Week III Switzerland and Austria

German Literature Month – Effi Briest Group Read Week II

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This is the second week of our Effi Briest Group Read. This week the questions have been sent out by me.

What strikes you most in this novel,  what do you like or dislike the most?

What strikes me personally most is that I don’t dislike anything. I find no superfluous words, no false tones in this novel. I think it’s an incredibly accomplished book that is as moving the second time as it was the first time I read it.

I really love everything about the book but I do have pretty strong reactions towards some of the characters. Instetten is for me, this time, a pompous insufferable git. I truly hate people who think they are superior. He patronizes Effi wherever he can. He is very rigid and follows rules and orders.

Do you think Fontane likes Effi? Whose side is he on?

I was wondering very often and think, he must like her a great deal or I wouldn’t feel for her. As a person she is quite opposite to myself or people I’m usually interested in, now as well as when I was 17. She isn’t introspective but fun-seeking. I think if Fontane didn’t like her, I wouldn’t feel the way I feel about her. She is a bit like a little animal that needs protection.

What do you make of the story of the Chinese and the haunted house. How would you interpret it? And what about Crampas’ interpretation?

I’m surprised how important this story is as this is something I had completely forgotten although I love a good ghost story. I think Effi is extremely isolated and all sorts of things play tricks on her mind. I also think it’s foreshadowing things to come but for fear of spoilers I’m not going to elaborate on this.

Crampas interpretation strikes me as spot on and it does enforce my negative feelings for Instetten. Wanting to educate or drilling Effi is so like him.

Descriptions are an important part in Effi Briest. How do you like them and how important do you think they are for the novel?

This question is tied to the next one. I had a feeling that the novel moves back and forth from outdoor to indoor scenes and in the outdoor scenes the descriptions are very important.

The region in which Kessin is located bears a lot of dangers for humans. There are the marshes that can swallow you, the snow can cut you off from the outside, the storms make ships sink. This seems very symbolic and full of foreboding.

The contrast between the loveliness of Effi’s family’s garden compared to the bleak landscape around Kessin emphasizes her loneliness. She would need a welcoming home but the house she lives in scares her as well.

The descriptions of the outside world also seem to point to things to come and the night in which Effi and Crampas sit together in the carriage and almost sink into the “Schloon” (that’s the German expression and I have no clue what the corresponding English word is, I guess marsh) seems full of foreboding.

It struck me while I was reading this novel how Fontane pairs descriptions of cozy and scary. Did you notice this as well and if so, what did you make of this?

For a tormented soul like Effi’s the idea that feet are running over her head and that she is all alone in the dark unwelcoming house in Kessin is very scary. I found the whole novel much more “gothic” this time around than when I first read it. The contrast to her family home, in which everything was cozy is very striking.

Another scene where I saw this pairing was when she walks in the wood with Crampas and it begins to snow. It might be a scary idea usually to be snowed in but Effi mentions a poem set druing the war, in which an old woman was snowed in and the snow-covered her up so the soldiers couldn’t find her. The idea warms Effi, she feels that being snowed in means being sheltered from the outside world.

What do you think of Crampas?

I didn’t think Crampas was such an unlikable character but he is a very irresponsible man. He should have thought of Effi and not start something with her. Of course he is trapped in a loveless marriage as well but he doesn’t seem to love Effi either. He is clearly a player. He likes to break rules and says so early on. I think it’s maybe as much about having an affair for him as about doing something forbidden. Still in the scenes in which we see them together he is far nicer to Effi than her husband and she seems a more mature person in his presence, not a little child that fears to be criticized at any moment.

Fontane chose to describe more than one Christmas in this novel, what do you think Christmas signifies?

Christmas is traditionally a family holiday. There is more than one Christmas in the novel and they are all slightly different. They do mark the passing of time but also show what it means for Effi to have left Hohen-Cremmen. Her first Christmas is a very lonely one. The second is slightly better but she misses her family. What struck me is that there was no attempt at spending Christmas together. I found that unrealistic. I can’t imagine a reason why they didn’t visit Effi’s parents. It felt like a punishment when I read it, as if she was an outcast.

What kind of mother is Effi?

I think she is quite a devoted mother. The child turns her into a grown up but, as it was usual then, someone else, in this case Roswitha, spends much more time with the child.

Where will the novel go from here? What do you think will happen next?

As I have read it before I’ll skip the question of course.

Please leave a link to your post in the comments section or in the Mr. Linky. (To see the participants, you have to click on Mr Linky).

Wednesdays are wunderbar – It’s Crime Time – Jakob Arjouni Giveaway

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Today we have another special treat for you, courtesy of Melville House Press we give away one set of Jakob Arjouni’s Kayankaya series to one lucky winner.

This is a great series and anyone who will win it will surely like it.

The giveaway is part of German Literature Month and  is open internationally but if you would like to enter you have to hop over to Lizzy’s blog where the giveaway is taking place.

Good luck!

German Literature Month – Effi Briest Group Read Week I

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This is the first week of our Effi Briest Group Read. The questions have been provided by Lizzy (here is her post).

I’ve read Effi Briest before and liked it a lot. I was eager to find out what I would think of it this time. Out of the three tragic heroines – Mme Bovary – Anna Karenina and Effi Briest – she was always my favourite. I’m glad to discover a book that I like even more than the first time I read it and a heroine that touches me even more deeply. This is strange as I have nothing in common with Effi. And it is also interesting as once more it shows that there is no such thing as a spoiler in literature. On the very contrary, to know the outcome gives you a chance to pay more attention to other things than plot.

1: Welcome to the 1st German Literature Month Readalong!  Had you heard of Theodor Fontane and Effi Briest before now?  What enticed you to readalong with us?

I think I will skip this question.

2:  Which edition/translation are you using and how is it reading?

I’m reading a German paperback edition. It has an appendix of 100 pages but I didn’t read them this time around.

3:  Is the novel living up to your expectations?

As I wrote in the intro, I read this before and liked it a lot. For me to re-read a book it needs some very specific elements. Liking isn’t one of them. I didn’t “like” Mme Bovary but I read it three times. I did however like Effi Briest but it’s also a very subtle novel, a novel from a mature author, one of the best of German literature, it offers a lot, still, re-reading is the ultimate test. And it passed the test. It’s as wonderful as the first time or even better. I was much more attentive than when I read it 6 or 7 years ago.

4:  What do you make of Effi Briest and Baron von Innstetten.   What motivates them?  What do you make of their match?

It has been said that Effi was very much the product of her upbringing. I tought this is obvious in the way she speaks about this marriage. I think she is very estranged from herself and doesn’t really know what she wants for herself, although, she has an idea. She isn’t an intellectual, she knows as much. Effi isn’t a contemplative heroine who likes to read and brood, this is a lively young girl who likes entertainment and fun, yet society and her family want her to be successful and successful means attract a successful husband. As she says “Anyone is the right one as long as he is aristocratic, has a high position and is looking good”. I wasn’t sure what to think of Instetten at first. I thought for a while that he wasn’t so bad but he is very condescending. There are these little remarks about Effi’s intellect that are extremely hurtful. He belittles her constantly, even when he pays her a compliment it’s a trapdoor.

5:  How are you reacting to Effi’s parents?

“Das ist ein zu weites Feld” or “This is a vast field” (I don’t know how it is translated) is the pet sentence of Effi’s father. He uses this sentence constantly all through the novel and I think a person like this in real life would drive me up the wall. He avoids every conversation of problematic topics but the sentence also shows that he is well aware that things are not as they seem. Of the two (mother and father), he is the more likable and also the much more understanding. It’s the mother I  have a real problem with. It’s this attitude of having your own child experience what you went through, for the sake of society, that I find revolting. She infuriates me. She knows very well that poor Effi is far too young for Instetten.

6:  Are there any secondary characters to whom you are particularly drawn?  Any to whom you are adverse?

I love Frau Kruse and the black chicken and Gieshübler is an interesting person. He is the antithesis for me to all the other characters, someone who stayed good despite adversity and doesn’t pass on the bad things he may have experienced.

7: Effi Briest was originally serialised in 6 parts.  I’m assuming that its 36 chapters were published in 6 monthly parts of 6 chapters each and the novel so far seems to bear this out.  How does the mood of the first part (chapters 1-6) contrast with that of the second (chapters 7-12)?

The first chapters are playful and light. We meet an exuberant Effi, one who does only know good things, is sheltered and child-like. She loves the idea of getting married and climbing the social ladder. She is a bit wary of Kessin, as there might not be a lot of entertainment but she is still looking forward to it. Once she is there that changes rapidly and she feels like an animal in a cage.

8:  We finished our first reading at the end of chapter 15 or the middle of part 3.  Where is Effi in terms of her psychological development and how does this bode for the future?

I think that she has to a certain extent realized that she made a mistake but she hopes for a change through her child.

Please leave a link to your post in the comments section or in the Mr. Linky. (To see the participants, you have to click on Mr Linky. It’s Mr. Linky for wordpress – meaning NOT sophisticated)

Joseph Roth, Irmgard Keun, Christa Wolf Giveaway -The Winners

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It’s my pleasure to announce this week’s winners who have been drawn by random.org list generator.

The winner of Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March is – megan

The winnder of Irmgard Keun’s After Midnight is – Susanna P. from Susie Bookworm

The winner of Christa Wolf’s No Place on Earth is – Litlove from Tales from the Reading Room.

Happy reading, megan, Susanna and Litlove!

Please send me your contact details via beautyisasleepingcat at gmail dot com.

The giveaways are part of Lizzy and my German Literature Month in November.

The next giveaway will take place on Wednesday 2 November.

Should anyone want to participate in the organized Effi Briest readalong, please leave a comment or sign up here and we will send you the questions for week 1. 

Tatjana Soli: The Lotus Eaters (2010) Literature and War Readalong October 2011

Posted in American Literature, Books, Novel by

Soli’s debut revolves around three characters whose lives are affected by the Vietnam War. Helen Adams comes to Vietnam in the hopes of documenting the combat that took her brother from her. She immediately attracts the attention of the male journalists in the region, and quickly falls into an affair with the grizzled but darkly charismatic war photographer Sam Darrow. As Helen starts to make her own way as a photographer in Vietnam, drawing as much attention for her gender as for her work, Darrow sends her his Vietnamese assistant, Linh, a reluctant soldier who deserted the SVA in the wake of his wife’s death. While Linh wants nothing more than to escape the war, Darrow and Helen are consumed by it, unable to leave until the inevitable tragedy strikes. The strength here is in Soli’s vivid, beautiful depiction of war-torn Vietnam, from the dangers of the field, where death can be a single step away, to the emptiness of the Saigon streets in the final days of the American evacuation.

For one reason or the other I had a hard time getting into this novel. I struggled for almost 100 pages but all of a sudden I was hooked, fascinated and almost entranced. And I wanted to talk about it. I don’t always feel the urge to talk about what I’m reading but with this book, I felt it because the topics Soli chose are still as conflicting and important today, during any war, as they were at the time, in Vietnam.

The book starts in 1975 with the fall of Saigon and then switches back to 1963 and the moment when the young photojournalist Helen Adams arrives in Vietnam to cover the war. Helen is keen, eager and ambitious and a sensation as she is one of the first women photographers to want to cover a war.

Helen’s character is complex and interesting and through her we see the fascination and problems of this dangerous profession. Helen’s character is based on the stories of real photographers, one of them Dickey Chapelle, one of the first female war photographers who was killed in action.

There aren’t many professions that I find as problematic as war photographer and the novel does a fantastic job at letting us look into their world.

Helen knows from the start that if she wants to become a famous photographer, shoot interesting pictures, she must follow the men into combat. This is not only dangerous, it’s also voyeuristic because the photographers take pictures of everything. Dying soldiers, executed Vietnamese, piles of bodies, screaming children, in short, people during their final moments. They often wonder whether they are more than just vultures, whether it is justified to do what they are doing. On the other hand they get addicted to the high they experience in the heat of the action and the exhilaration that follows an incredible shot that will go on the cover of a magazine and will be seen by the whole word.

Helen and the others constantly oscillate between two states of mind, the selfish drive and the urge to help and reveal to the world what is going on. It seems as if this was a very addictive job and when the novel nears the end and at the same time the end of the war, there is a feeling in the air as if a party was over.

The danger cannot be underestimated. Not only the soldiers, whom Helen gets to like, are killed, many fellow photographers lose their lives as well. One could say the better the picture, the more dangerous the situation was for everyone involved and especially for the subjects.

An older woman from the group, a mother or aunt, screamed and ran forward toward the alcove, and one of the soldiers shot her. Captured on film. The curse of photojournalism was that a good picture necessitated the subject getting hurt or killed.

I was wondering why I always find it much more problematic when someone shoots a photo of a wounded or dying person but have far less of a problem when a reporter only tells or writes about it. Maybe because the dying people lose their privacy. In order to get a good shot, the photographer needs to focus on the pain, to invade the space of the other.

A the heart of The Lotus Eaters is a complex love story or rather the story of a love triangle. I was far less interested in that aspect of the book and that’s maybe why I didn’t like the beginning so much as it focuses a lot on that story line.

Soli manages to give a good feeling for the war. She captures how the war and its perception changed over time, shows how different its meaning was for those abroad, the Americans and Europeans who lived in Vietnam,  as well as for the Vietnamese people. In the beginning the presence of the French can still be felt.

The Americans called it “the Vietnam war”, and the Vietnamese called it “the American war” to differentiate it from “the French war” that had come before it, although they referred to both wars as “the Wars of Independence”. Most Americans found it highly insulting to be mentioned in the same breath with the colonial French.

The descriptions of the city, the country and the jungle are vivid and evocative. For that alone the book is worth reading. I equally liked how she managed to show what it meant for women to cover war. There are no women soldiers and when the female photographers follow a group into combat, they are the only women present which was problematic as well. There were sexual tensions and the fact that the men felt responsible for the women, furthermore they didn’t want to be seen injured or wounded by women.

When Helen goes back to the US for a while, in the late 60s, she tries to make people understand why she does this job. Helen explores her reasons very often and at one point she has to admit it is also because she excels at what she is doing.

“I just went as a lark. It turned into something else. What do you do if you have a hazardous talent, like riding over waterfalls in a barrel? A talent dangerous to your health?” After the question came out of her mouth, she felt embarrassed.

I’m glad I read The Lotus Eaters.  It has many beautiful passages and is very thought-provoking. It gives an in-depth view of one of the most dangerous professions without giving any easy answers. It’s up to the reader whether he thinks they are purely adrenaline addicted vultures or whether they are doing a heroic and admirable job.

I often wonder whether we need those pictures. Do we need to see the horror in detail, up close? Does it help stop wars? In one instance Helen says that every good war picture is an anti-war picture. Is that true and does it justify what they are doing?

I’m curious to hear what others thought.

Other reviews:

Anna (Diary of an Eccentric)

 

Danielle (A Work in Progress)

Serena (Savy Verse & Wit)

Wednesdays are wunderbar – Joseph Roth, Irmgard Keun and Christa Wolf (English or German) Giveaway

Posted in Books, German Literature by

Today we have a different kind of giveaway. The books are personal contributions and that is why you can win them either in English or in German. The giveaway is part of Lizzy and my German Literature Month in November.

The books I selected are the following:

Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March (1932).

The Radetzky March is one of the very great novels of 20th century literature. It’s a swan song, a melancholic depiction of the end of an era.

The Radetzky March can fairly claim to be one of the great novels of the last century. Its theme, beautifully articulated, is the end of an era. His anthem for a vanished world has the intense, fleeting beauty of a sunset’ Sunday Telegraph ‘He saw, he listened, he understood. The Radetzky March is a dark, disturbing novel of eccentric beauty… If you have yet to experience Roth, begin here, and then read everything’ Eileen Battersby, Irish Times ‘The true reading pleasure afforded by the rich environment Roth captures may well have increased over time, while the schisms at the heart of Europe continue to fascinate. It seems that we are rediscovering in twentieth-century Central European literature classics for a new millennium.”

Book number two is After Midnight (1937) by Irmgard Keun.

Keun was a very successful writer until the Nazi’s came. Her novel After Midnight and all of her other works (the most famous is The Artificial Silk Girl) were confiscated and banned. She flew from Nazi Germany together with her lover Joseph Roth. Keun is a tragic figure. In and out of psychiatric hospitals, alcoholism… Her biography is as fascinating as her novels. There is a lot of her own life in the novels too.

What I like a lot about her writing is that it seems so deceptively simple while in reality it is full of explosives. In After Midnight a young woman with the voice of a child describes the most upsetting things. It’s a lucid depiction of the ascent of Nazism and shows, like not many other novels, how and why the Nazi’s were so successful. The fact that a very simple, almost simpleminded girl tells the story makes it an uncanny read.

In 1937, German author Irmgard Keun had only recently fled Nazi Germany with her lover Joseph Roth when she wrote this slim, exquisite, and devastating book. It captures the unbearable tension, contradictions, and hysteria of pre-war Germany like no other novel. Yet even as it exposes human folly, the book exudes a hopeful humanism. It is full of humor and light, even as it describes the first moments of a nightmare. After Midnight is a masterpiece that deserves to be read and remembered anew.

The third book is Christa Wolf’s No Place on Earth (1979).

No Place on Earth is a special book for me and a special book for this event. It is my favourite Christa Wolf and its topic fits nicely into our event as it depicts an imaginary encounter between Heinrich von Kleist and the poet Karoline von Günderrode. Von Günderrode is hardly read anymore although she was very influential. She was the friend of Bettina von Arnheim (born Bettina von Brentano, sister of Clemens Brentano) who wrote a book about her which is really wonderful. Von Günderrode and von Kleist never really met but – that’s what Christa Wolf imagines – if they had…. Who knows, they might not have ended their lives. Both authors committed suicide at an early age and are seen as victims of the circumstances in which they lived. In Wolf’s novel they are given the opportunity to meet and to find that they are kindred spirits. It’s a very poetical novel and I would wish that whoever wins it will like it as much as I did.

This fictionalized account of an encounter in 1804 between the poet Karoline von Gunderrode and writer Heinrich von Kleist is pieced together from extracts of actual letters. In real life, both committed suicide some years after the events in this book.

If you would like to win one of those books, or enter for more than one, please let me know which ones you would like and why you would like to win them. Also indicate if you would like the book in English or in German. There is only one little condition – you should be a participant of German Literature Month.

The giveaway is open internationally, the books will be shipped by amazon or the book depository. The winners will be announced on Sunday 30 October 18.00 – European – (Zürich) time.