My Books and How They Got There
Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of .
I live in Berlin, in a neighborhood with a chronically understaffed post office, so books on their way to me from the United States are usually in for an adventure.
A package from example, arrived dripping wet, even though it hadn鈥檛 rained in Berlin for a week. Luckily, the texts themselves were all intact, and a little water damage has only lent a pleasant air of world-weariness to the appearances.
Another package I received, this time from , had been opened, its contents shoved into my mailbox, and the envelope stuffed crookedly in after them. Is that even legal?, I wondered, are they even allowed to open my stuff? Turns out, yes, but only is the stuff is books. Since most of them were about hard-boiled detectives, I figured they were used to some rough handling and didn鈥檛 feel too sorry for them.
But the best (by which I mean most unusual) delivery arrived this week: an absolutely enormous blue bag bearing the seal of the Belgian post, one gaping end knotted shut with plastic cords. It was the sort of bag I imagine Santa Claus would use if he were a Belgian mailman. For a moment I hoped that there would just be one giant book inside, but instead there was another, slightly smaller blue bag, tidily wrapped and stamped by Sweden Post.
The treasure inside this strange blue matryoshka was more than worth the trouble it took to wrestle it out. Inside the blue Swedish bag, surrounded by what I assume used to be an envelope but which now resembled something closer to the insides of a sofa after they鈥檝e been torn up by a very eager puppy, were eight books from , dusty but otherwise unharmed. Among them were several titles I鈥檇 been looking forward to for some time: Ingrid Winterbach鈥檚 , Amanda Michalopoulou鈥檚 , and of course the splendid anthology that鈥檚 been getting so much attention on this blog recently, .
Of course, no matter how bizarre the story of a book鈥檚 arrival at my front door might have been, its importance fades as soon as the experience of the text itself takes over. One of those half-drowned Archipelago titles, Scholastique Mukasonga鈥檚 , has proved a moving and memorable read. One of the few novels from sub-Saharan Africa to be eligible for this year鈥檚 BTBA, Our Lady of the Nile centers on an elite girls鈥 boarding school in 1970s Rwanda, shortly before a wave of ethnic violence breaks out. I recently reviewed the novel for , where I wrote of it as both a collective coming-of-age story and a prelude to genocide.
The book I鈥檓 reading currently, Jenny Erpenbeck鈥檚 , was unusual in that it arrived at my apartment completely unscathed. It鈥檚 the first novel by Erpenbeck that I鈥檝e had a chance to read. It begins with the death of an eight-month old baby and traces the ramifications this death later has on the child鈥檚 family. But then, in the first of the book鈥檚 many 鈥淚ntermezzo鈥漵, the baby is resurrected: time rewinds itself, the baby is saved in the nick of time. She鈥檚 given a second chance at life, allowed to grow up for a few more years. When she finds another death, she is resurrected again, and so on; the main character, whose name we learn only at the end of the novel, keeps dying and keeps not being permitted to die, until she has lived through nearly the entire twentieth century.
A serious (in my opinion, unfortunately humorless) meditation on death, The End of Days was striking to me not only for its compelling premise, but also for the quality of its translation. Susan Bernofsky has produced an exceptionally powerful English version of this very German text; the book鈥檚 prose, just like its cover when it arrived in my Berlin mailbox, showed no sign of having made a transatlantic journey.
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