To set this up, you might want to read Part I and/or this write-up about the first of the four parts of the massive novel.

If you don’t feel like reading either of those, here’s what you need to know about ´ˇ˛Ô˛Ôľ±±ą±đ°ů˛ő˛ą°ůľ±±đ˛őĚýbefore reading Damion’s responses: Anniversaries centers on Gesine Cresspahl, a young mother living in New York in 1967 with her daughter, Marie. Using a diary format, she recounts their life in NYC while also explaining the history of her family back in Eastern Germany in the build-up to World War II. The diary entries range from recaps of what was in the New York Times that day to long stories to Marie about Germany to short anecdotes about their trips to Staten Island and the like.

I think that’s all you need to know. Probably. These questions are kind of in the weeds, but I think you’ll find them interesting—even if you haven’t read the book.

Chad W. Post: One thing that struck me in reading the first volume of the book was Marie’s age. She’s supposed to be 10, but does a lot of things—exploring the new subway lines on her own, doing a lot of shopping alone, very politically aware (which doesn’t seem too out of keeping with her age)—that don’t really seem age appropriate. (I barely trust my eleven-year-old to change his underwear on a daily basis.) Times were different, I suppose? Or, what occurred to me as I started reading this second part, was that Gesine is the one describing Marie’s action. And in both a conversation with Marie about Robert Papenbrock and one of the internal ones with Jacob, Gesine acknowledges either leaving out particular information or refashioning it for the story. So maybe this is Marie as being told to us by Gesine? And not Marie a very-realistic-depiction-of-a-10-year-old-in-1967? I don’t necessarily have a question about this, except that I wonder if the “believability” of Marie’s age struck you at all as you read/translated?

Damion Searls: Marie as a precocious child is one of the things that strike most readers of the novel. As a very eminent realist novelist commented to me over email (in private, so I won’t say who it is), precocious kid characters are really hard to pull off, in novels or movies, but when it works they’re amazing, and Johnson really nails it, in this writer’s opinion and in mine.

What Marie does is certainly different from children today, for instance in the great chapter where she explores the new NYC subway lines on her own, but I have to say that I was a child in New York not too long after her, in the 70s, and I took the subway by myself at age six or seven, for example, so I don’t think it’s that unrealistic.

Probably more interesting is what these aspects of Marie’s personality say about her character. I mean think about it: she has no father, minimal to no extended family, she moved to a new country speaking a foreign language at age 3—she has had NO ONE in the world except Gesine, and has obviously adapted accordingly. Naturally she’s going to be independent, with interesting things to say about intellectual topics, someone who pleases adults, and so on.

It’s smart of you to think about the fact that Gesine is shaping the presentation (the way she also, of course, shapes the child by being her mother!). There’s an incredible chapter you’ll get to soon where Gesine suddenly asks Marie: So, what do you think of my family? and Marie gives her take, and we suddenly realize that the whole third-person novel we’ve been getting about Germany is a first-person story after all, shaped by Gesine. As the book goes on, especially near the beginning of Part 3, there’s an increasingly clear story arc of Marie’s growing confidence and self-awareness: she is more and more able to challenge Gesine and is slowly getting closer to adolescent rebellions.

CWP: Another thing I’m obsessed with right now (and/or have been for ages) are various patterns in narrative structure. Anniversaries basically declares its cyclical structure in both title and diary structure. There’s also the parallel between the advent of World War II and the ongoing Vietnam War in a “history repeats itself” style. But what particular draws me to this book, so far, is how time is represented in the two-plus narrative styles. There’s: 1) the faster moving Germany sections in which years pass, and time elapses between visits to that storyline; 2) the daily occurrences reported in the New York Times and relayed in a factual, of-the-moment fashion; and 3) Gesine’s accounts of their days, which are in between the two in terms of narrative compression. What I’m more curious about—and in part because of your comment that this was initially intended to be a trilogy, which you can see in the three water scenes—is is there is another level of organization that a first-time reader might not pick up on. Like the three water scenes that open books I, II, and III, but not IV, or more subtle things about how frequently certain settings/situations/characters recur. A more simply way to ask all this: Are there other markers I should be noting as I read through this the first time?

DS: The swimming scenes are the most apparent markers—there are a few others I know about (e.g., one all-New York Times chapter per part), but I don’t think they’re very important to readers, or to me as a translator. I think that’s one of the strengths of the book, actually. Compared to, say, Dante, where every little piece fits together into this giant system, or Proust, which gets so much of the big picture into every little detail—practically any pair of adjectives describing any noun in the book is the whole polarity and structure of the Proustian universe in microcosm—Anniversaries is much looser. There is an openness to different kinds of material, new ways of telling the story, the book is actually very playful and moves more unpredictably.

And in any case, the structure changes and kind of falls apart in part 3, which turned into parts 3-4—the balance between the storylines shifts, which is why those months got so much longer.

CWP: Silly technical translation question: Did you refer to any of the actual NY Times articles when translating those bits?

DS: Absolutely, of course. Sometimes Johnson/Gesine is directly quoting Times articles (translating them into German), so I wasn’t going to try to reverse-engineer the English; more often, Gesine is filtering the Times, emphasizing or being sarcastic about various bits, and so I would refer to the English, decide where I thought Gesine was changing the article instead of just translating it, and then morph the English to match. Plus the language was just different then than it is now: the still-new term “teen-ager” was hyphenated; they referred to “Negro” issues, of course, including “racial disorders” instead of unrest or violence; Vietnamese place names were spelled differently; the whole tone was slightly different. Things brings in good sixties texture. I was sometimes sad to lose some of the nuance or humor in Johnson’s translations—for example, the informer explaining drug slang to the Times saying “Geschwindigkeit ist tödlich,” i.e., “Rapidity is deadly,” as Johnson’s very German translation for “Speed kills”: I think that’s funny and I tried to think of a way to keep it in without it being too obtrusive, but eventually I let it go.

CWP: There is so much violence permeating this book—the Times reports, the mafia section in book I (which was the weirdest bit to me), the wars—and yet there’s such a sense of calmness to this book. Part of that, I think, is due to the tight focus on the characters as characters, but there are other craft things that keep the violence as a sort of lurking backdrop rather than the sole focus. Not sure if you’d agree with me, or if I could properly articulate all those techniques (the pastoral depictions of Jerichow that accompany the changing social situation, Marie’s seeming invulnerability giving the reader a sense of security, the switch to more domestic interests like marriage after chapters of more upheaval), but I wondered if this informed your writing of the text. If there were particular words or phrasings that you avoided or tones you leaned into in order to maintain this tension.

DS: That’s a perceptive and sensitive way to put it—I hadn’t thought of it quite that way. I agree that Johnson’s lyricism and sensitivity to nature (sunsets, rivers, light and water) are crucial and beautiful counterpoints to the brutal history. Marie is certainly confident, but it’s hard for us as adults to have faith in her own sense of invulnerability, so that doesn’t feel safe and secure to me. I tend to think more about Gesine’s pretty strong defense mechanisms, her ways of trying to keep experience and history at least partly under control, so I don’t think of it as calm, exactly. The more outwardly cool she is, the more turmoil and horror she’s trying to keep at bay.

Johnson, a bit like Gesine, almost-suppresses a lot: he writes in a very slanting and sometimes cryptic German, where it’s not always obvious what’s going on and a tiny little nuance is all he gives the reader to figure it out with. This is like life, of course, where we have to interpret people from occasional encounters and glancing gestures.

In terms of the tone, that’s what I was thinking about most: compression, rapidity, little sharp details that open up into much wider meanings but don’t spell everything out. Which is hard as a translator, because I have to figure it out and then compress it down again—unpack everything and then “repack” it, you might say. My best example of this comes in Part 4—ask me about it then if you’re still interested!

Chad W. Post: How did you first come to Uwe Johnson’s work? 

Damion Searls: He wrote a book in homage to his friend, the great Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, after she died tragically young in 1973—I was and am a huge fan of hers so that was how I first discovered Johnson. Bachmann’s Letters to Felician and Johnson’s book about her, A Trip to Klagenfurt, would be the first two books I translated. But when I found out he had written a four-volume novel that takes place three blocks away from where I grew up in New York City, of course I had to read that.

CWP: This is a super mundane question, but given that I’m planning on spending the better portion of four months reading this book, I’m curious how long it took you to translate it all.

DS: I first read it—it took me about a year—some 25 years ago, which is halfway between now and the events of the story. I translated a couple of chapter/days back in the 90s, but the main part of the work was in 2013–18, during which I also wrote a book and translated a lot of other things. I usually say it took me 2 years to translate over the course of about 5 years, but that’s aside from the 20 years of lead time.

CWP: What’s the full story behind the first version of ´ˇ˛Ô˛Ôľ±±ą±đ°ů˛ő˛ą°ůľ±±đ˛őĚýin English? I know it was abridged, came out in a weird way with multiple translators, and has been out of print for quite some time. But why was it abridged? Were the cuts motivated by the publisher to try and reach a wider audience? Or by the author/translators? 

DS: So in German the book was originally going to be a trilogy, which is why Parts 1 and 2 cover four months each. The first four months were published in 1970—fast! really soon after 1967–68!—and then the second four months came out in 1971—also fast!—and the last four months was announced for 1972. But then Johnson got stuck, putting off Part 3 until 1973 and eventually publishing only half of the last third then, as the current Part 3. Life crises and creative crises and health problems meant that Part 4, the last two months of Gesine’s year, wasn’t finished until 1983.

There are internal signs of the book’s tripartite structure still in there, for example every part begins with a swimming scene but Part 4, i.e. the second half of “Part 3,” doesn’t.

Johnson was forced to drastically abridge the book for the English translation, and did, which is why it’s sometimes said the abridgement was “with his blessing”; it wasn’t totally voluntary though. Leila Vennewitz translated the abridged first six months (abridged Part 1 + abridged first half of Part 2) and that came out in 1975; she went ahead with the next four months (half of abridged Part 2, all of abridged Part 3), then had to wait, and died before Johnson published Part 4 in 1983. They brought in Walter Arndt to translate the abridged Part 4, and that was included with the rest of Vennewitz’s work as the second half of the two-volume Anniversaries in English, published in 1987. By that time, Vennewitz’s first half was long since forgotten; I wonder if anyone made their way through the second half of the English.

Aside from the heavy cuts, which really change everything, Vennewitz’s translation is also flawed in other ways, though it’s not my place to go into that in detail. Arndt kind of phoned his part in, I have to say, though you can’t blame him. When I proposed translating the rest of Anniversaries and splicing it into the existing translation, Edwin Frank, the editor of NYRB, read the earlier one and said no, it doesn’t work, you need to do the whole thing.

CWP: Putting aside the issue of time, what are the other main challenges in translating a book of this magnitude? And how much did you rely on the earlier translation?

DS: I didn’t rely on it, but I certainly referred to it; Vennewitz also had the advantage of translating while Johnson was alive, so there is some correspondence between them about tricky translation problems in the book. I was glad to have his answers to her questions. The book is very canonical in German, so there are books and books of secondary literature on it too; there’s a giant line-by-line commentary, also available online, that gives all the references and everything like that.

That said, as I’ve , it’s the slowest, hardest book I’ve ever translated, not because of the references or because the novel is a difficult readerly experience, if anything because it ľ±˛ő˛Ô’t. It’s quick and sharp and fluid, but that means you have to be really on the ball as a translator and find ways to keep the narrative moving, so it doesn’t get sluggish and turgid.  (We can maybe talk about some examples once you get farther into the book?) One of the really helpful edits I got from Edwin Frank was encouraging me to use a lot more contractions (“couldn’t” or “it’s” or “aren’t”), which translations from German often underuse because there aren’t contractions in German, so if you’re not really thinking about it, a two-word translation (“could not,” “it is”) is the easy way to go. And yet contractions really keep things moving in normal English—this paragraph has eight of them. Not using them is part of what can make translations from German feel heavy, or in a worst case sound robotic.

As for the length of the book, those difficulties were mostly logistical, about funding and carving out enough time to do it. NYRB could take on the project only once I’d gotten quite a lot of funding from elsewhere: a Guggenheim, the Cullman Center, a multiyear grant from the Goethe Institut.

CWP: It’s been a decade since I read any Uwe Johnson books, but in my memory, Speculations about Jakob ˛ą˛Ô»ĺĚýTwo Views are pretty . . . experimental, for lack of a better word. What struck me in starting ´ˇ˛Ô˛Ôľ±±ą±đ°ů˛ő˛ą°ůľ±±đ˛őĚýwas that, from a simple reader’s perspective, it’s pretty easy to fall right into. I’m not sure if it’s because of the primary setting (NYC), the way the NY Times bits grounds the time period, or the mostly straightforward switches between Gesine’s life in NYC and that of her parents, but, so far at least, this is far less “work” than I would’ve expected going in. Is there anything you’d say to readers out there who might be intimidated to start this? Any background info that’s particularly useful to approaching this book?

DS: I really think Anniversaries feels much more contemporary and vivid and relatable than the other big masterpieces, Ulysses and Proust and The Man without Qualities and even Tolstoy. You’re right, Johnson’s earlier books are more difficult, arguably unnecessarily difficult. You’re not wrong to be put off from them, especially in the existing translations. Anniversaries, on the other hand, is a joy. There are several reasons for this: Johnson was more mature when he wrote it; the story is, as you say, firmly grounded in the great character of Gesine and her daughter and the concrete situation of NYC and each date; and I do think it helps that the book is translated better than his earlier novels, keeping it more quick and alive.

The book is about someone living in the sixties and living with the legacy of the past, so there’s a lot of historical information in the book, but Johnson’s a great writer and a storyteller so he always gives the reader whatever they need. I think reviewers have sometimes made the book sound like a giant, daunting piece of grad-school homework—and maybe the publication as a big black box set of two big volumes makes it look intimidating—but it really ľ±˛ő˛Ô’t. People like the book! It’s a story, with incredibly beautiful writing! It’s the same length as the Ferrante series, which was also published in four volumes, and no one complains that that’s too long (never mind Game of Thrones!). Also, the chapters of Anniversaries tend to be short, three or four pages long (there are just a lot of them); each new chapter bounces the different storylines off each other in a new way, so it’s more of a page-turner than you might expect. You’re reading about Germany and eager to get back to New York, then reading about New York and can’t wait to hear what’s happening to Gesine’s parents in Germany, and Johnson keeps it going for all those hundreds of pages.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting each and every one of these as part of the annual “Why This Book Should Win the BTBA” series. It’s a fun way of learning about all of these diverse titles, and hopefully finding a handful that you personally want to read.

Speaking of diverse, I want to use this post to point out a couple of interesting facts about this year’s list:

• Twenty-three different publishers have a book on this list, which is unprecedented;

• There are translations from sixteen languages on this year’s longlist;

• This year’s longlisted authors are from twenty different countries.

That’s a pretty solid spread. Not to mention the vast differences between these books: On the one hand there’s Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek’s Her Not All Her, a slim, exquisitely crafted Cahier; on the other, there’s Antonio Muñoz Molina’s gigantic In the Night of Time. There’s the two-volume slipcased A True Novel by Minae Mizumura and Stig Dagerman’s short story collection, Sleet. There’s a very unconventional Arabic work from the nineteenth century just now being translated for the first time, and there’s a novel about an execution from Mo Yan, the other Nobel Prize winner on the list.

Overall, it’s an excellent list, one that will be really tough to pare down . . . But that’s the job for this year’s brilliant judges: George Carroll, West Coast sales rep; Monica Carter, Salonica; Scott Esposito, Conversational Reading and Center for the Art of Translation; Sarah Gerard, Bomb Magazine; Elizabeth Harris, translator; Daniel Medin, American University of Paris, Cahiers Series, Quarterly Conversation, and the White Review; Michael Orthofer, Complete Review; Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books; and, Jenn Witte, Skylight Books. I want to personally thank them all for their hard work.

But this is just the beginning—on April 15th we’ll announce the finalists for both fiction and poetry, and in the meantime, stay tuned to read about each and every one of the following “best translated books” of 2013.

Also, a special thanks has to go out to for once again making $20,000 of prize money available for the winning authors and translators.

I’ll post information about any and all celebrations for the BTBA 2014 here as soon as things are arranged. In the meantime, here we go . . .

translated from the French by Lulu Norman (Morocco; Tin House)

translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter (Romania; Archipelago Books)

translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu (Israel; Feminist Press)

translated from the Swedish by Steven Hartman (Sweden; David R. Godine)

translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Italy; Europa Editions)

translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett (Netherlands; Open Letter Books)

translated from the German by Damion Searls (Austria; Sylph Editions)

translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Norway; Archipelago Books)

translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (Hungary; New Directions)

translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull (Ukraine; NYRB)

translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor (Argentina; New Vessel Press)

translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (Spain; Knopf)

translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters (Japan; Other Press)

translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Spain; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Gray (Guatemala; Yale University Press)

translated from the Norwegian by Seán Kinsella (Norway; Dalkey Archive)

translated from the French by Christine Schwartz Hartley & Anna Moschovakis (France; Ugly Duckling Presse)

translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies (Lebanon; New York University Press)

translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb (Iceland; FSG)

translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent (Netherlands; Pushkin Press)

translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker (Czech Republic; Portobello Books)

translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (Spain; McSweeney’s)

translated from the French by Paul Knobloch (France; Tam Tam Books)

translated from the German by Damion Searls (Germany; FSG)

translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt (China; University of Oklahoma Press)

A few of the BTBA judges have talked about how honored they are to be part of this process. I am also, but I want to be clear about one thing: it’s a lot of work.

The above is my tiny home office. It’s located in a small alcove in the hallway between my kitchen and my bathroom, in the studio apartment I share with my husband. The picture is in no way representative of the way my office looks every day. What I mean is this: recently, I left McNally Jackson Books, where I’d been a bookseller for three years, in order to join the team at BOMB Magazine, a publication that consistently pays homage to the art of translation. Because it would be difficult to inform every publisher of my address change, I still receive BTBA submissions at McNally Jackson, and have to return there every few days to pick up my mail. Each time, I find anywhere between two and ten new titles on the hold shelf for me, and add them to these stacks.

Meanwhile, new emails are coming in all the time from publishers; PDFs of books, eBooks, .mobi books. The judges are racing to keep up. And the list is always growing. Here are some of my recent favorites.

by Rodrigo Rey Rosa (trans. Jeffrey Gray)

I mentioned BOMB Magazine. The current issue, #125, features a truly excellent conversation between Rodrigo Rey Rosa and Francisco Goldman. Rey Rosa was a protégé of Paul Bowles, who translated many of his books. It was under Bowles’s tutelage that Rey Rosa discovered his passion for writing, and it was Bowles who initially recognized Rey Rosa’s talent. Rey Rosa later returned to his home of Guatemala, where most of his books are set, and where he currently lives. But The African Shore is set in Tangier, a textured, mystical place full of almost noir-like intrigue. The possibility of violence hums on the outside of two stories held together by colonialism and the life of a snowy owl. Of the book, Francisco Goldman asks

FG: A propos of The African Shore, were there any special challenges for you in setting a novel in Tangier instead of Guatemala? Did you still consider yourself to be an outsider or a foreigner in relation to Tangier, or did you consider it home?

RRR: I wrote it in 1998. I dared to write the book when I realized that the Tangier that Bowles had written about—or better yet, created—had changed so much that it was no longer the same city. Only the wind remained… I lived there, and partially in New York, from ’82 to ’92, and spent summers in Tangier until 2001. When I started writing the novella, I could sense that I would never live in Morocco again. The book became a sort of farewell. But I never thought of Tangier as a home. I’ve never been at peace at home—but in Tangier I often was.

Regarding Jeffrey Gray’s translation, all I can say is that the book reads like a vivid dream seen through an opium haze, and sentence-by-sentence, is beautiful. I admit that I haven’t read Bowles’s translations, but am inspired now to seek them out and compare styles.

by Stig Dagerman (trans. Steven Hartman)

Two of Stig Dagerman’s books are up for the award this year: Sleet, a short story collection, and Burnt Child, a novel that I am now, after reading Sleet, very excited to begin. I admit, I had never heard of Stig Dagerman, but was intrigued by Sleet_’s introduction by Alice McDermott, blurbs from Graham Greene and Siri Hustvedt, and my general love of David R. Godine’s Verba Mundi series. As it turns out, Dagerman was a prolific writer in Sweden, who in his time was compared to everyone from Faulkner to Kafka to Camus. While most of the stories in _Sleet are a mote less philosophical than any of these writers’ works, I would be remiss if I didn’t strongly recommend the first and last stories, “To Kill a Child” and “Where Is My Icelandic Sweater?” (Laugh at the second title – it’s fine.) “To Kill a Child” had me hooked immediately and was promisingly quick and devastating, and “Where Is My Icelandic Sweater?”, a nearly novella-length work, had me reduced to a tear-soaked pile of loss and bereavement, and memories of my grandfather. Dagerman’s writing is personal and unsettling, hewing closely to characters being made to undergo humiliation and loss in an environment – mid-century Sweden – that’s almost too quaint for comfort. I would happily read this collection a second and even a third time.

by Elfriede Jelinek (trans. Damion Searls)

This was one of the last books I staff picked as a bookseller at McNally Jackson:

The irony of a writer (Robert Walser) trying desperately to craft his own identity, only to succeed tragically at channeling through his words the voices of others. Jelinek captures Walser’s sad humor, his loneliness, and the eventual silence (silencing or death) of a voice that spoke through so many other voices. By way of madness? Genius? Damion Searls’s translation captures beautifully the skill of both writers: Jelinek’s performance and her ode to Walser.

I read this entire book in one mad, intensely satisfying, Homerically victorious sitting. I felt compelled despite its many (gorgeous, thrilling) challenges, to reach the end. Added to which, the book itself is lovely to look at – true objecthood achieved, Sylph Editions.

Here I should recall my last BTBA post, wherein I discussed Christa Wolf’s book City of Angels, which is also up for the award this year, and is also translated by Damion Searls. As it happens, Searls also – a trifecta of cool – translated Robert Walser’s A Schoolboy’s Diary, which is up for the award this year, too, and which author figures centrally into this Jelinek book we’re talking about currently – making a complete Searls circle, if you will.

by Boris Vian (trans. Paul Knobloch)

I’m currently reading this book and am already completely blown away by it. While I’m not sure I can do it justice here, being that I’m still in the middle of it, I can already say that Vian’s (and Knobloch’s) sentences are some of the most lively I’ve ever read, and that the allegorical nature of the story rivals Kafka and Wells in its grace and complexity. It’s not exactly science fiction, but neither is it exactly Surreal. It’s something entirely its own – no other writer has done what Vian’s done here.

But back to His ire comes from the introduction that James “I’m Going to Do One of Everything” Franco wrote for Damion Searls’s recent retranslation of Hermann Hesse’s which is available from Penguin Classics.

It makes total sense that Penguin would ask a James Franco to write an intro for this book—since everyone knows Franco, whereas 98% of people under the age of 25 have never heard of Hesse¹, and anything to sell books.

What Ulin take umbrage towards is how self-indulgent and pointless this introduction is, a reaction that I can totally get on board with. (As can most people who favor quality over celebrity.)

His foreword, brief at less than three pages, highlights his discovery of the novel, as a 19-year-old UCLA dropout.

“Working at the North Campus eatery,” he writes, describing his own alienation, “I was serving the students who once had been my classmates.” He cannot explain to them why his decision to pursue acting over academics is so important, so elemental, but in the pages of Hesse’s novel, he feels understood.

To be fair, the situation Franco describes is one many readers will have experienced, that of finding one’s self in a book. It’s similar to the way I felt at the same age about On the Road, Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, Camus’s The Stranger (and, yes, even, Steppenwolf and Siddhartha), as if in their pages, my inner life had somehow been written into being.

Franco, however, never pierces those surfaces, never explains to us his love for Hesse’s novel and what it means. The closest he comes is to observe that “Demian became my Demian, a voice I could listen to and contemplate as I tried to find my way from childhood to adulthood and into the world of art.”

Yes, yes, I want to say, but give me some insight on your relationship with the book. At its best, after all, what Demian has to offer is an abiding sense of conflict, of a character caught in the middle, between what’s expected and something more undetermined and wild. This, though, is a conflict Franco doesn’t seem to recognize.

Part of the problem is that Franco insists on writing about himself rather than Hesse’s novel, which leaves him unable to see the book on broader terms. Yet whatever the reason, his pat and superficial foreword is little more than a distraction — the very thing, in other words, that Hesse and Demian argue against.

David’s totally on point with his critique, but just to give you an example of just how bad this intro is, check out this paragraph:

After a couple of months [working at the North Campus eatery] I started reading Demian. I’m not sure if there was a connection, but one day, without warning, I hung up my apron and walked out the back, never to return. I had planned to work that day, so once I’d taken my exit, I didn’t know where to go. With Demian folded in my pocket, I headed into Westwood, full of passion because of what I had done. On the edge of campus I ran into one of my former classmates, a girl I once had flirted with, sunning herself on the grass. I told her what had happened, but it didn’t seem to register. I felt as if I had taken another step away from a conformist life and another step toward artistic freedom, but, talking to her, I sounded to myself like an immature kid who had quit his job.

I’m not sure which bit is better: “I’m not sure if there was a connection” or “a girl I once had flirted with.”

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE.

So, I just actually read the Penguin Classics (“Because what you read matters.”) press release until right now. Here’s the header:

Featuring a Foreword and Cover Art by James Franco.

Cover art! See—one of everything! Oh, that Jimmy. Aside from the fact that both faces sort of look like Franco himself, the cover art isn’t bad.

The back side of the press release is killer though. There are bios for all the players: Hesse (who, mind you, won the Nobel Prize in 1946 and, for a time, was one of the most popular and respected writers in the world), Damion Searls, Ralph Freedman (professor emeritus of comparative literature at Princeton), and James Franco. There is exactly one photo on this back page . . . this one:

That’s right! Hermann Hesse! Oh, nevermind. Not sure if you can see in this pic, but Franco’s bio is also twice as long as Searls’s and about 18X Hesse’s.

Thank you, Penguin Random House Worldwide DominationCorp for making my morning with this shit. It’s hard to come slave away for literature that’s respected by a core group of readers’ readers when it’s so nice outside and no one is on campus. But the amount of true gut laughter I’ve experienced this morning reading Franco’s intro and this press release is so therapeutic. Totally mitigates the interior existential malaise at the fact that quality means to little to so many people these days. And that by criticizing the Franco Technique, I’m sure people will label me as an elitist, instead of someone who cares about literature and the value of thought. (Is there a difference though, really?)

I’ll end with the immortal words of Riff Raff Alien, the best character Franco has ever played: “SPRING BREAK FOREVER, BITCHES!”

¹ This is a verifiable fact.

The nine stories and novellas of this collection, arranged in chronological order of their writing, come together to form a composite portrait of a single life — quite transparently a version of Nescio’s own. In his early stories, such as “The Freeloader” and “Young Titans,” the narrator is Koekebakker, who is idealistic, poor, and (mostly) happy, confident as he is “going to do something_” with his life. A vague, beautiful something that animates him and his group of four like-minded friends. The narrator looks back on this youth with jaded wistfulness: “We were kids — but good kids . . . We’re much smarter now, so smart it’s pathetic.” But in spite of this cynicism, it is surprisingly easy to get caught up in the half-baked ideas and humorous antics of Koekebakker & Co. They are a bit ridiculous, especially seen from the narrator’s half-bitter, half-indulgent viewpoint, but they are sincere, delightful, and recognizably _real. The exception of course is Japi, the exasperating but fascinating “freeloader” of the collection’s first story, who is more allegory than man. He observes, he sits, he walks. He borrows money, smokes other people’s cigars, and takes his friend’s cloak when they are walking in the rain. And, when the world catches up with him and tries to pin him down into a job, he quietly and almost cheerfully steps off a bridge. A simple (even silly) story, but Nescio pulls it off with grace and warmth.

By “Little Poet,” written when Nescio was thirty-five, the narrator begins to lose his wistful nature and takes a more openly mocking stance toward his protagonist, and possibly against poetry in general. He leaves Koekebakker and his group behind, moving on to a nameless, doomed young poet, whom he pokes fun at mercilessly. One of the conduits of this fun-poking is the God of the Netherlands, who can’t seem to understand why he bothers to keep creating poets, particularly the meek, boyish breed like the Little Poet in question:

Twice the God of the Netherlands shook his venerable head and twice his long venerable muttonchops slid back and forth across his vest.
bq. It didn’t add up. There must be a mistake somewhere. A poet with no hair, that was very strange. The God of the Netherlands hadn’t cared much for poets for thirty years. You could no longer tell what to make of them. Respectable or disrespectable? Impossible to say . . .

God sighed. He’d have to talk it over with a real poet tomorrow. Maybe Potgieter . . .

Look, there goes the little poet. A handsome young man, you have to admit: thin, with a nicely shaved boyish face except for a pair of flying buttresses in front of his years, and so suntanned. He greets someone, tilting his straw hat a fraction about his close-cut hair.

Bizarre—so little hair—but it definitely was a little poet because God couldn’t figure him out, or Potgieter either. And Professor Volmer wanted nothing to do with him.

At one point, the Little Poet is walking down the street when he sees a group of women sitting outside a cafe and prays silently, “Oh God . . . what if you performed a miracle now, what if all their clothes suddenly fell off?” The narrator hedges this oh-so-scandalous thought playfully, writing in an aside: “You and I, dear reader, never think such things. And my dear lady readers . . . Mercy me, perish the thought.”
In his later stories, his writing begins to take on a different character. By “Insula Dei,” written twenty-five years and two World Wars later, his tone is bitter, though not unsentimental: Nescio has become an old man who cannot understand how his life — the shining promise he saw in his youth — has blinked past him. His nostalgia is more morbid now, colored as it is by war, hunger, and age. Reminiscing with the narrator about their youth, his friend Flip laments: “Back then we died of consumption, not tuberculosis.” Nescio’s skill lies in his ability to make even this macabre thought a thing of beauty.

As the title suggests, this is, in a sense, also a “city book” after the fashion of Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale (New York) and Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (St. Petersburg). These authors live and breathe their cities, and these works draw their readers onto the streets, into their cafes and parks and back alleys. Nescio accomplishes this with beautiful subtleness; Amsterdam is never the focus of his tales, but remains an unobtrusive but constant and compelling presence.

All in all, Nescio’s stories — often tragic but always beautiful — linger in the mind. They do not seem to have been composed; rather, they unfold with the grace of inevitability. Their melancholy weight means that they are best consumed slowly, leaving time between the stories to allow them to settle and be absorbed. At only 155 pages, this slim volume has a quiet power to match that of the most sweeping of Great Novels.

Hannah is one of two Hannahs interning at Open Letter this summer. We’re still working on a good nickname for her—for now, depending on the situation, we (read: I) have been referring to the Hannahs as “Hannah” and “Other Hannah.” (If yet another of our interns, Reagan, was also a Hannah, things would get messy. Other Other Hannah?)

Anyway, this relatively small volume of stories by Nescio sounds pretty cool, particularly the chronology of style behind it, and falls into the category of compact volumes from NYRB that I personally can’t wait to dive into—a fairly long list that (in no particular order) includes .

Here’s the beginning of Hannah’s review:

Nescio, Koekebakker, J.H.F. Grönloh. Writing only in his spare time, he was known to most of the world as a respectable and prominent businessman, the director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company: exactly the kind of man whom his early protagonists would scorn, and at whom his later protagonists would smile grimly, knowing that “respectability” is society’s code-word for “half-stifled misery.” Producing only a few short stories, he went largely unnoticed during his lifetime, only posthumously gaining a place in the canon of Dutch literature. Now, his poignant and subtly humorous Amsterdam Stories have finally been brought to an English-speaking audience by Damion Searls, an award-winning translator who works with German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch texts.

The nine stories and novellas of this collection, arranged in chronological order of their writing, come together to form a composite portrait of a single life — quite transparently a version of Nescio’s own. In his early stories, such as “The Freeloader” and “Young Titans,” the narrator is Koekebakker, who is idealistic, poor, and (mostly) happy, confident as he is “going to do _something_” with his life. A vague, beautiful something that animates him and his group of four like-minded friends. The narrator looks back on this youth with jaded wistfulness: “We were kids — but good kids . . . We’re much smarter now, so smart it’s pathetic.” But in spite of this cynicism, it is surprisingly easy to get caught up in the half-baked ideas and humorous antics of Koekebakker & Co. . . .

For the rest of the review, go here.

This is all fine and dandy—but one of the really great things about City of Angels is the way that it reminds us that in dreams (unlike, say, episodes of CSI), every character is you, meaning that after a certain point the trace-hiding villain and the clue-uncovering detective must turn out to be the same person. The book’s particular value as a work, not just about, but of atonement, lies in its relentless struggle to make the two Christa Wolfs face one another. This is much harder than you might think, given Wolf’s relentless honesty as an author and public figure—but then doesn’t it make sense that the better a detective was at detecting, the better their concurrent villain would be at covering his tracks?

In City, it is precisely this ability to cover, or rather sublimate (to borrow a word from the man whose overcoat furnishes the subtitle to this book) that scares Wolf. When a German newspaper uncovers and then reports a series of meetings that she had with the communist authorities decades earlier, she finds herself flabbergasted, not by the crime itself, but by her inability to remember it. Practically everyone living in communist East Germany collaborated, she explains—but to forget this collaboration completely, and for so long? It’s like she’s robbed a house while sleepwalking: the standard language of will and guilt are literally applicable, but incapable on a deeper level of explaining exactly what happened. Is she guilty despite the fact that she forgot her crime? Because of this? Couched as they are in ecstatically-recriminatory language, the newspapers’ explanations of the case don’t make sense; and because they don’t make sense, Wolf is unable to feel any catharsis from their condemnation. On the contrary, she feels like a ghost, which is like being a prisoner except worse, since without sentencing there can be no hope of serving one’s time and being released.

In the face of this disjunction, Wolf turns to the only tool she knows for righting (writing) the world. Her atonement, which begins in thinking and journaling, but then progresses into a novel that I think we can say without too much of a jump into meta-ness is City of Angels itself, is a linguistic act. It’s a naming, meaning an attempt to assemble words into a shape that fits her suffering the way a map fits a city. In order to do this, Wolf uses a number of formal devices that seem alienating at first, but gradually reveal more and more to her, and us. One of the most effective of these is her habit of addressing a “You” who we realize after many pages is not a separate person at all, but the young German idealist that she used to be. As developed and dipped into over the course of the novel, this conversation manages to be strangely both dispassionate and intimate at the same. It’s as if we were reading the letters of an old married couple, now divorced, but still very close to one another: the insights are sharp, but there’s a tenderness about the liberties taken that make us realize that, for all their bickering, these are two people who share more than they want to admit.

One of the things they share, of course, is memory—not just specific memories but the patterns of remembering that Wolf suggests makes a person who she is. In her particular case these patterns are (like certain abnormal heartbeats) reliably unreliable. “I know that, sometimes. And then I forget it again,” she says apropos some insight—a sentence that can be read as both harmless and terrifying when we consider the fact that the person speaking has been, over the course of her life, not only a writer, but a German and a communist. Her pedigree gives Wolf a perspective on idealism that makes American amnesia look less like a cultural feature and more like something all human minds indulge in. At the same time, it doesn’t make this amnesia any less frightening. “I didn’t forget most of the things in my life, I wouldn’t survive,” counsels a sympathetic friend. To which the horrified Wolf asks, “Was our whole life for nothing?”

It’s a question that people have been asking for years in Los Angeles—which may be why, for all its Sebaldian meandering, City of Angels feels like a perfect fit for its setting: the great lost Teutonic Raymond Chandler novel. It’s a detective story, meaning a Bildungsroman played backwards or maybe looped, until the heroine finds herself forced to unlearn certainty and so enter into a more capacious acceptance of what she will not and, more importantly, cannot know. This sounds suspiciously similar to the forgetting that disturbed Wolf to begin with; but it is really a step in the opposite direction. It’s the step we see offered and declined at the end of that great proto-detective story Oedipus Rex, or offered and accepted at the critical moments in Shakespeare’s comedies. A generic signpost, in other words, pointing this way to a work where everyone ends up dead, and that way to a work where the heroine’s pride gives way to her love, and we all go back to our normal lives. Did we find out whodunit? Not exactly—but the killer is no longer at large. Writing—meaning exploration, detection, the search—has seen what it needed to see and then stepped back, leaving the unknown there but still lucidly absent, like a chalk outline on a sidewalk. Or, as Wolf puts it in her notebook:

“Now, writing is just working your way towards the border that the innermost secret draws around itself, and to cross that line would mean self-destruction. But writing is also an attempt to respect the borderline only for the truly innermost secret, and bit by bit to free the taboos around that core, difficult to admit as they are, from their prison of unspeakability. Not self-destruction but self-redemption. Not to be afraid of unavoidable suffering.”

The idea that any line of inquiry might pull back with the truth in its crosshairs sounds strange when we think about it from a legal point of view, but Wolf is not a lawyer: she’s a writer, meaning, among other things, someone concerned with lived experience. Like Dostoevsky and Melville, she understands that there is a blind spot at the center of all epistemology, whether it occurs on TV, or in a courtroom, or at a communist rally. Words don’t fit; so, as users of words we must either willfully blinker ourselves or accept that no tabulation will ever be perfect, and that we will always, on some level, be at fault. We will also be at least partially innocent—a_ fact that would seem like a relief but which Wolf struggles over the course of _City to accept. That she does not (in my reading at least) completely testifies both to her seriousness and the book’s strange faith; not in words necessarily, but in the ultimate unknowability of what words try to describe.

Josh Billings has reviewed for The Literary Review in the past, and is also a writer and a translator from Russian. His two book-length translations are Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin and Alexander Kuprin’s The Duel, both of which are available from Melville House.

Here’s a bit of Josh’s review:

Christa Wolf’s newly-translated City of Angels is a novel of atonement, and in this way the work of art that it resembles most to me is not another book, but the 2003 Sophia Coppola film Lost in Translation. Like that movie, its perched-on-the-shoulder meandering through a foreign city (Los Angeles in Wolf’s case, Tokyo in Coppolla’s) is patient to the point of boredom; at the same time, it is a very rigorous attempt to represent a state of being that more eagerly-paced works ignore. The effectiveness of this attempt is undeniable within the works themselves, but communicating it outside of the works can be frustrating. It’s like trying to tell a friend about a great dream you had: the events add up, but the atmosphere that surrounded those events vanishes. Reverse-engineering this disappearance, we could say that the most successful part of both City of Angels and Lost in Translation is not their locations, or their characters, but their dreaminess: that is, their capacity to transform the world (at least while we’re reading/watching them) into a place where everything means something, or has the potential to mean something. Wandering around in this supercharged world becomes a sort of metaphysical sleuthing. Does that sunset matter? Will the pair of shoes dangling from that telephone line have an eventual bearing on our fate? We don’t know for sure, and because we don’t know for sure we feel compelled to keep searching for whoever or whatever knocked our lives out of whack to begin with.

This is all fine and dandy—but one of the really great things about City of Angels is the way that it reminds us that in dreams (unlike, say, episodes of CSI), every character is you, meaning that after a certain point the trace-hiding villain and the clue-uncovering detective must turn out to be the same person. The book’s particular value as a work, not just about, but of atonement, lies in its relentless struggle to make the two Christa Wolfs face one another. This is much harder than you might think, given Wolf’s relentless honesty as an author and public figure—but then doesn’t it make sense that the better a detective was at detecting, the better their concurrent villain would be at covering his tracks?

In City, it is precisely this ability to cover, or rather sublimate (to borrow a word from the man whose overcoat furnishes the subtitle to this book) that scares Wolf. When a German newspaper uncovers and then reports a series of meetings that she had with the communist authorities decades earlier, she finds herself flabbergasted, not by the crime itself, but by her inability to remember it.

Click here to read the entire review.

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from The Goon Squad (Knopf)

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (Farrar, Straus And Giroux)

David Grossman, To The End of The Land, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen (Knopf)

Hans Keilson, Comedy in a Minor Key, translated from the German by Damion Searls (Farrar, Straus And Giroux)

Paul Murray, Skippy Dies (Faber & Faber)

Interesting that there’s literally no overlap between this list and the National Book Awards shortlist . . . Not terribly surprised that Freedom is on here, but I really, really hope it doesn’t win.

In terms of the two translations, Dan Vitale reviewed both Comedy in a Minor Key and The Death of the Adversary for us earlier this year. Every since then (and after reading the almost over-the-top review in the New York Times), I’ve wanted to read this.

We never actually received a copy of To the End of the Land, but I’ve heard it’s pretty awesome . . . On a side-note, I had a sit-com like experience with David Grossman at the last Frankfurt Book Fair. When I was waiting to meet people for dinner, I crashed the fancy Hanser party, right during the time when Michael Kruger was introducing all the famous guests who were in the audience. I was circling around the back, trying to make myself invisible, when suddenly Kruger pointed right at me and said, “and we even have the recipient of the German Book Trade Peace Prize in the audience!” Everyone—truly everyone—turned to stare right through my guilty-looking self and applaud David Grossman, who was quite literally, right behind me . . . Anyway, hopefully Knopf will send us a review copy at some point . . .

And in terms of award announcements, we might have more about the NBCC awards later, but on Thursday, we’ll be announcing the 25-title fiction longlist for this year’s Best Translated Book Award. Stay tuned!