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Tag: german

  • New Books in German at 20

    Jen Calleja: When did you begin editing NBG and what interested you in the role initially? Has your focus changed over time?

    Charlotte Ryland: Being appointed to edit NBG in autumn 2009 was a bit of a dream-come-true for me. I was working full-time in academia, having recently finished a doctorate in German literature, but was becoming aware that an academic career wasn’t for me. I was keen instead to get involved in some sort of outreach work – to spend more time talking to people, basically – and to do more journalistic writing alongside my academic research. I must admit that, having spent ten years in the world of German Studies, I knew relatively little about contemporary German literature, and I was genuinely surprised by the quality of the books that I started to encounter. I also had no idea what a vibrant community I was about to join – the world of literary translation – and I guess my focus since has been influenced by that community. I’d only been in the job a year when I set up our ‘Emerging Translators Programme’, which is one of the things that I’m most proud of.

    JC: It feels like such a significant achievement that NBG has been going for twenty years, what’s its life-blood (apart from the editor that is)?

    CR: This is an easy one. NBG has an incredible support network, and is a great example of successful international cooperation. We are supported financially and in other ways by a wonderful set of partners from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, the UK and the USA, and the collaboration really works. Our steering committee and editorial committees meet regularly and are full of very experienced people who really care about the project and its aims. Add to that the translators, reviewers, writers, designers and many others who support our work in a variety of ways, and you get an impression of the huge number of people working with a common aim. As editor, this means that life is bursting with emails and phone calls, and that can sometimes be overwhelming, but I’m certain that it’s the core of NBG’s success.

    What was it like for you, jumping into a project with such a huge network?

    JC: Well, having graduated my MA in German Studies only a year previously and having just finished a six month internship at the magazine before you offered me the role I definitely wasn’t prepared for the well-oiled and very serious machine that is NBG. I’d done my own small Anglo-German magazine Verfreundungseffekt before that, but I definitely didn’t have to coordinate committees for it. Or lead annual report meetings. Or stick to any kind of super tight schedule. I mean, we usually have task lists that have to be completed down to the week or more often the day otherwise things can start to slide. I remember being in awe of how positive and enthusiastic all the partners were from the start, and I quickly came to understand how NBG connects up so many people who speak so highly of it.

    The magazine was founded out of a real need to get more German-language books published in English translation, and twenty years on it feels like we need it more than ever, would you agree?

    CR: Yes! In fact, I don’t really know where to start in responding to that question. The referendum on the UK’s EU membership, and its aftermath, have been such an enormous blow, and it’s hard to see quite where to go next. I would usually say that there is a surfeit of books dealing with Germany’s 20th
    Century history in English translation – that it doesn’t reflect the wealth of German-language literature out there. But it’s starting to seem that an enormous number of people have already forgotten what happened in the 1930s and 40s, and have completely divorced their understanding of the EU from its founding concepts of peace and community.

    How do you think that NBG can best respond to what’s happened this year?

    JC: That’s obviously an enormous question – I would say that NBG and projects like it just have to keep going and not doubt for a second that they’re worthwhile and necessary. On bad days it might seem insignificant, but it is ultimately a gesture of being open, tolerant, curious and outward rather than inward looking. Sharing stories and communicating with one another are the most human of compulsions.

    What have been your favourite NBG memories or moments? And what have been your greatest challenges?

    CR: I’ve been very fortunate to travel to some wonderful literary festivals and gatherings while working for NBG. Leukerbad festival in the Swiss mountains was a particular highlight, as were the ‘Literature Days’ by the Danube in Austria. Spectacular backdrops for encounters with fascinating people – and it’s definitely the people that make the job so enjoyable. Challenges would have to be the enormous work-load and the never-empty inbox – which for a part-time freelance position can be tricky. And most recently, managing the redesign of our print issue was a challenge from which I may never recover. I’m really pleased with the outcome, but I vow never to manage a design committee again.

    JC: The new – 40th
    ! – issue has just come out, which we got to edit together. What are your personal highlights?

    CR: Flattery aside, it was a genuine highlight to edit it with you! As you know, despite the huge support network, the editor’s job can be rather solitary and there’s certainly a major burden of responsibility for each issue. Sharing that, and having somebody else get to know the project so well, has been fantastic. In terms of this issue’s content, my two highlights are the interview with Anthea Bell – celebrating her 80th
    birthday – and the piece on the Emerging Translators Programme (ETP) and the NBG internship. Anthea is a wonderful person and working with her on the editorial committee has been a definitely career highlight. She has such a way with the written word, and this comes out beautifully in the interview – you can hear her speaking as you read, and it brings a smile to my lips every time. Just looking at the photos in the ETP piece makes me happy – I’m really pleased with how the programme has developed and with how well so many of the ‘graduates’ have done since then. Working with them all has been a very enriching experience.

    And what about your highlights from the past two issues that you’ve edited?

    JC: I think from issue 39 – the women’s issue – it would have to be the interview with Karen Duve on feminism: ‘femininity is like a bucket full of jam that gets tipped over your head as a child and then drips down on you throughout your life’. I’m so glad I bothered her publisher for an interview at the last minute. And in our anniversary issue I love the statements from past and present editors and partners for the anniversary spread. I vow to honour Rebecca Morrison’s traditional post-issue vodka and espresso while I’m here at Frankfurt Book Fair. I should probably wait till after all my meetings are done. I think I loved everything in the two issues I edited in 2013-2014 because I was so happy and proud that they got to print and I didn’t ruin everything.

    What do you think the project’s greatest achievements have been since your time editing it began and what are your plans for the future?

    CR: This question takes me back to the network idea. I think the project has expanded by interacting with other people and organisations, while still retaining its core focus of the twice-yearly magazine and the website. For the past four years we’ve been the media partner of the German Book Prize, publishing all the English material for the shortlisted authors, which has been a great development, and we’ve worked hard to expand our virtual presence through social media and the newly revamped website. Now that NBG is twenty, I’m keen to explore new avenues, particularly with a view to new collaborations. There are a huge number of organisations now that work to promote literatures in other languages, and we all share the single aim of bringing more literature in translation into the English-speaking world. I think that we can better achieve that aim by working together, and look forward to making that happen in the years to come.

    charlotte-ryland-picCharlotte Ryland is editor of New Books in German and works at Oxford University, as Lecturer in German at The Queen’s College and Research Assistant on the Writing Brecht project (brecht.mml.ox.ac.uk).

     

    jen-calleja-picJen Calleja is acting editor of New Books in German and a literary translator from German. She is currently translating Dance by the Canal by Kerstin Hensel for Peirene Press and essays on art by Wim Wenders for Faber & Faber. www.jencalleja.com

    Visit New Books in German online – a brand new website, plus read the latest edition of the journal.

    Find the latest PEN-supported titles translated from German on the World Bookshelf, including Clemens Meyer’s Bricks and Mortar.

  • You speak such good German

    Alina Bronsky, Russian-born but writing in German, charts the challenges and opportunities faced by the multilingual author, and how well-meaning condescension can get in the way of literary appraisal.

    Translated from the German by Tim Mohr

    It’s not exactly the height of elegance to quote from your own book. But I will do it here anyway.

    ‘You speak such good German,’ said a boy to Sascha, the heroine of my first novel, Broken Glass Park, whom he had just met. ‘Thanks,’ she answered angrily, ‘so do you.’ She was born in Russia and lives in a Russian ghetto in a German city. The boy she’s talking to is German by birth and lives in a fancy villa; he’s actually trying to say something nice to her.

    This little exchange isn’t made up. It happened to me in reality on many occasions, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Like my protagonist I moved from Russia to Germany at thirteen. Ever since I was fourteen I’ve been congratulated on my German. I can no longer remember the moment when I stopped feeling pleased by the compliments.

    I belong to the subset of authors who write books in a language that is not their native tongue.  Not long ago that still made me quite exotic in Germany. Now it is hearteningly common – every year you read about gifted debut authors who were born abroad, emigrated as young children or teens, and who published in the language of their new country and are already dusting off all their literary prizes. And yet, the compliments about how well I speak German are still the first thing I hear from audiences at my readings. At 36, I’m still treated as some kind of language wunderkind.

    Unfortunately I’m not one, and never have been. I’m not even particularly good at languages. It’s just that I, like hundreds of thousands of others, emigrated with my family at an age when the infamous ‘language window’ had yet to close. Which is why I sound like a native speaker – with the exception of the occasional linguistic slip-up that only very alert listeners notice, and which those people like to point out to me. The assumption that I must be exceptionally musical – as a result of how well I speak German – is also not true. And how I would love to be able to speak better English than I do, not to mention French and Italian.

    I don’t want my books to be assessed like compositions in a foreign language class. It makes me feel like a dancer with a wooden leg: as if the applauding room isn’t captivated by the show of artistic prowess but rather by the supposed handicap. So I ask you, dear readers and reviewers, please judge the contents and the word choices, the plot and characters, the metaphors and punch-lines. Complain about inconsistencies and slips of the pen that escaped the eyes of the editor and proofreader. But please don’t be any more merciful in those judgments and complaints with an immigrant author than you would be with an author writing in his or her native language. You’re not really anyway, and we wouldn’t have deserved the leniency.

    No reader falls in love with a book out of political correctness or as a sop to a linguistic minority. I’m happy about that. If something in one of my novels doesn’t look right to you, then you can in good conscience toss it in the corner. And if on the other hand my writing intrigues you, it has nothing to do with the fact that I learned the Cyrillic alphabet before I learned the Latin alphabet. All authors want to be valued based on their imagination, their talent, and their perseverance, not because of school vocabulary lessons from some distant past.

    After more than twenty years, I can say that German has become my natural writing language. Even though I love my native language of Russian, I speak a version that’s probably already somewhat outdated and anachronistic. I’m asked time and time again whether I also write in Russian. No, I don’t, at least not beyond emails. I don’t translate my own books, either. I’d prefer to write new ones – in German.

     

     

    Alina Bronsky is the author of Broken Glass Park, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, which was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and just published Just Call me Superhero.  The Daily Beast calls Bronsky ‘an exciting new voice in the literary world.’

    Born in Yekaterinburg, an industrial town at the foot of the Ural Mountains in central Russia, Bronsky now lives in Berlin.

    You can buy Alina Bronsky’s Just Call Me Superhero via our book partner Foyles.

    Read more about Alina Bronsky at her author profile at Europa Editions.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Arno Camenisch, author of The Alp

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission 

    Interview by Tasja Dorkofikis, PEN Atlas editor

    The Alp by Arno Camenisch is the first book in the award-winning trilogy about vanishing life in a remote and rural part of the Swiss Alps, in a hamlet of Sez Nez, on the slopes of the mountain of the same name. It is set within one season on a small, isolated summer farm. The four unnamed characters are a dairyman, his farmhand, a cowherd and a swineherd, who all live and work in close proximity with livestock – but this is no Heidi. The lives on the mountain pasture are dangerous, solitary and full of cruelty; yet Arno Carmenisch’s description of his characters is full of affection and humour and he clearly has a brilliant ear for their voices and the sounds of the setting. The novel has just been published by Dalkey Archive Press. Two more books from the trilogy will follow in English. These and other Arno’s books have also been translated into many languages.

    The Alp was written both in German and in Romansch. Why did you decide to write it in both and how did you do it?  Is Romansch your first language?

    I wrote the first book in German and then after it was finished I wrote it again in Romansch. The original book is bilingual and published in a bilingual form. I felt that it was important to write it in Romansch (or Sursilvan, the most widely spoken regional variety of Romansch) as I was setting the book in that small language area. I think that small languages have to open themselves to the world. I grew up in two languages. Romansch is the language of my heart and German is my literary language. I speak Romansch with friends and family. I believe that you make love and die in the language of your heart. When I write in Romansch for me it is like seeing a tree, when I write in German I can see the whole wood. The difference, for me, is between being close, or being at a certain distance. I feel more empowered when writing in German.

    The Alp presents the life in the mountains as harsh, monotonous and cruel. Is it the world you know yourself?

    I got to know this world as a child and I lived the life on an alp over a few summers. I felt that people were unhappy there. They were confined to this one enclosed area for the whole summer; they could not leave. The weather was harsh and the work physically very hard. Despite the illusion of space one associates with mountains, being on an alp has a claustrophobic element. But this is my subjective view of this world and I am sure that an ethnographer would disagree with my version, name things differently.

    Indeed, The Alp could almost be described as a documentary novel.  Was it your intention to document the disappearing life in the Alps or did you set off to write something more universal?

    I really was writing about people and their interaction. I was interested in the closeness of people and nature, in the harsh conditions of their lives, in living with the oppressive presence of the mountains, and the feeling of being encaged by the Alps, like being on a ship. I grew up in Tavanasa (in canton Grisons/Graubünden), in a village of 50 people. For half of the year there you don’t see the sun as it is always hiding behind the mountains. The novel could be described as a docu-fiction, but it is a very subjective view of this world. My last novel in the trilogy, Last Last Orders, is about a group of people talking in a village bar – people always react to it as though it is set in their own village.

    ‘The cheese is swelling. During the night, the stone weights crash to the floor, waking everyone. The swineherd and the cowherd carry the over-ripened cheeses through the clear night, across the yard, through the cowshed, to behind the cowshed, and dump them in a slurry. Neither the dairyman nor his farmhand budges to help. They stay where they are in the doorway, their hands in their pockets.’  The Alp is written in small rhythmic and melodic vignettes, with no event taking precedence, but each miniature with its own drama, not dissimilar from flash fiction.  Why this interesting, horizontal structure?

    I wrote the book in images, in closed scenes, almost like scenes from a film. It is written chronologically, and the full book gives a full picture, like a mosaic. But I also believe that the book is not finished without the reader. The reader’s background plays a role as well in finding a meaning in a book. A book could be different with every reading depending on where the reader is and how the reader thinks.

    The rhythm of your prose makes it wonderful to read aloud. You perform your texts in public. Do you write your books with the underlying intention of reading them aloud?

    Yes, I love reading out scenes and the sound of the text matters. It varies depending on the language. The sound is stronger and a bit different in Romansch, maybe more musical than in English. I perform various texts a lot and this book renders itself to reading aloud too. I also belong to a Spoken Word ensemble ‘Bern ist überall’, so this aspect of writing is important to me.

    Donal McLaughlin’s translation mastered that rhythm of the language very well.  How do you work with your translators?

    I normally try to work very closely with my translators, to give them a lot of background and information. And in the case of this book, the life of the alp is very specific and it helps to understand the setting.

    And to come back to the issue of Romansch. Will you write your future novels in it as well? Do you feel that as a writer you have a role in keeping it alive?

    For most people who speak Romansch, the question of their language is not an existential question. Most of them are bilingual, work in German and speak Romansch at home. They are emotionally attached to it though, even young people. I live now in Biel/Bienne, which lies on the language boundary between French and German and it is a bilingual city, but you hear over 140 languages spoken here and it is very enriching to have so many sounds and so many cultures around. Linguistic diversity is good for openness and understanding. I don’t think that my role is to save Romansch – you cannot save a language, a language simply changes, moves. I write more in German then in Romansh: depends a bit on the weather. In the end, it is a question of writing, much more then a question of a language. I translate the pictures or scenes in my head onto paper. Of course, the language itself is really important, too. I’m interested in how people talk. The sound is the soul of the text.

    About the editor

    Tasja Dorkofikis is  editor of PEN Atlas and a freelance editor and publicist. She has previously worked as a publicity director at Random House and Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor for Portobello Books. Tasja divides her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Arno Camenisch, author of The Alp

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission 

    Interview by Tasja Dorkofikis, PEN Atlas editor

    The Alp by Arno Camenisch is the first book in the award-winning trilogy about vanishing life in a remote and rural part of the Swiss Alps, in a hamlet of Sez Nez, on the slopes of the mountain of the same name. It is set within one season on a small, isolated summer farm. The four unnamed characters are a dairyman, his farmhand, a cowherd and a swineherd, who all live and work in close proximity with livestock – but this is no Heidi. The lives on the mountain pasture are dangerous, solitary and full of cruelty; yet Arno Carmenisch’s description of his characters is full of affection and humour and he clearly has a brilliant ear for their voices and the sounds of the setting. The novel has just been published by Dalkey Archive Press. Two more books from the trilogy will follow in English. These and other Arno’s books have also been translated into many languages.

    The Alp was written both in German and in Romansch. Why did you decide to write it in both and how did you do it?  Is Romansch your first language?

    I wrote the first book in German and then after it was finished I wrote it again in Romansch. The original book is bilingual and published in a bilingual form. I felt that it was important to write it in Romansch (or Sursilvan, the most widely spoken regional variety of Romansch) as I was setting the book in that small language area. I think that small languages have to open themselves to the world. I grew up in two languages. Romansch is the language of my heart and German is my literary language. I speak Romansch with friends and family. I believe that you make love and die in the language of your heart. When I write in Romansch for me it is like seeing a tree, when I write in German I can see the whole wood. The difference, for me, is between being close, or being at a certain distance. I feel more empowered when writing in German.

    The Alp presents the life in the mountains as harsh, monotonous and cruel. Is it the world you know yourself?

    I got to know this world as a child and I lived the life on an alp over a few summers. I felt that people were unhappy there. They were confined to this one enclosed area for the whole summer; they could not leave. The weather was harsh and the work physically very hard. Despite the illusion of space one associates with mountains, being on an alp has a claustrophobic element. But this is my subjective view of this world and I am sure that an ethnographer would disagree with my version, name things differently.

    Indeed, The Alp could almost be described as a documentary novel.  Was it your intention to document the disappearing life in the Alps or did you set off to write something more universal?

    I really was writing about people and their interaction. I was interested in the closeness of people and nature, in the harsh conditions of their lives, in living with the oppressive presence of the mountains, and the feeling of being encaged by the Alps, like being on a ship. I grew up in Tavanasa (in canton Grisons/Graubünden), in a village of 50 people. For half of the year there you don’t see the sun as it is always hiding behind the mountains. The novel could be described as a docu-fiction, but it is a very subjective view of this world. My last novel in the trilogy, Last Last Orders, is about a group of people talking in a village bar – people always react to it as though it is set in their own village.

    ‘The cheese is swelling. During the night, the stone weights crash to the floor, waking everyone. The swineherd and the cowherd carry the over-ripened cheeses through the clear night, across the yard, through the cowshed, to behind the cowshed, and dump them in a slurry. Neither the dairyman nor his farmhand budges to help. They stay where they are in the doorway, their hands in their pockets.’  The Alp is written in small rhythmic and melodic vignettes, with no event taking precedence, but each miniature with its own drama, not dissimilar from flash fiction.  Why this interesting, horizontal structure?

    I wrote the book in images, in closed scenes, almost like scenes from a film. It is written chronologically, and the full book gives a full picture, like a mosaic. But I also believe that the book is not finished without the reader. The reader’s background plays a role as well in finding a meaning in a book. A book could be different with every reading depending on where the reader is and how the reader thinks.

    The rhythm of your prose makes it wonderful to read aloud. You perform your texts in public. Do you write your books with the underlying intention of reading them aloud?

    Yes, I love reading out scenes and the sound of the text matters. It varies depending on the language. The sound is stronger and a bit different in Romansch, maybe more musical than in English. I perform various texts a lot and this book renders itself to reading aloud too. I also belong to a Spoken Word ensemble ‘Bern ist überall’, so this aspect of writing is important to me.

    Donal McLaughlin’s translation mastered that rhythm of the language very well.  How do you work with your translators?

    I normally try to work very closely with my translators, to give them a lot of background and information. And in the case of this book, the life of the alp is very specific and it helps to understand the setting.

    And to come back to the issue of Romansch. Will you write your future novels in it as well? Do you feel that as a writer you have a role in keeping it alive?

    For most people who speak Romansch, the question of their language is not an existential question. Most of them are bilingual, work in German and speak Romansch at home. They are emotionally attached to it though, even young people. I live now in Biel/Bienne, which lies on the language boundary between French and German and it is a bilingual city, but you hear over 140 languages spoken here and it is very enriching to have so many sounds and so many cultures around. Linguistic diversity is good for openness and understanding. I don’t think that my role is to save Romansch – you cannot save a language, a language simply changes, moves. I write more in German then in Romansh: depends a bit on the weather. In the end, it is a question of writing, much more then a question of a language. I translate the pictures or scenes in my head onto paper. Of course, the language itself is really important, too. I’m interested in how people talk. The sound is the soul of the text.

    About the editor

    Tasja Dorkofikis is  editor of PEN Atlas and a freelance editor and publicist. She has previously worked as a publicity director at Random House and Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor for Portobello Books. Tasja divides her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

  • The Mussel Feast

    Birgit Vanderbeke introduces PEN Atlas readers to her book The Mussel Feast – a subtly political work that is steeped in metaphor – and her experience of penning her first novel at such a poignant moment in German history

    Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch

    In the beginning there was a discussion between the future author of The Mussel Feast and her friend Christiane. It was one of those discussions which used to take place around the kitchen table with a bottle of Italian red wine.

    The question being debated was whether the ‘mussel’ was a suitable feminist symbol for genital womanhood, as Christiane thought, or just a poor, vulgar image, as the future author said.

    Their discussion ended with the words, ‘Just you watch, I’ll show you how a mussel metaphor works.’

    All harmless stuff so far.

    That was in summer 1989.

    In August, the East started to collapse. The people did a runner, gathering in the embassies in Prague and Budapest. Demonstrations were held on Mondays, these demonstrations got larger and larger, and during that month I wrote The Mussel Feast with the television on all the time.

    The book that resulted belongs to the genre of German ‘Wendeliteratur’, and it has an outsider status within the genre because it is the only book on the subject of ‘reunification’ which was written before the fall of the Wall.

    At the time it was not difficult to speculate on what the future of the GDR might be, as there were only few options. Either the Central Committee would decide to act against the demonstrators as the Chinese had shortly before on Tiananmen Square, and the whole thing would turn bloody – which, given the global political climate was hard to imagine, although it could not be ruled out altogether – or the outcome would be what the poet Volker Braun described succinctly and conclusively a year later (i.e. after it had all happened) in his poem ‘Property’: ‘My country is going to the West’.  

    I must have sensed that this is what would happen. Of course I didn’t know what it would feel like when this country went to the West, but I could remember very precisely what it had felt like when I had come to the West (I didn’t go, I was brought along, aged five at the time). So, without having an exact idea of what form the impending political developments would take, I was about as sceptical of them as Volker Braun would be sad a year later.

    In March 1990, with the final election of the East German parliament, which was also the first democratic one, the history of the two Germanies took its course. Also in March – parallel to the momentous events – the history of The Mussel Feast took its course. The book found a small, but classy publishing collective in Berlin, which immediately sent it, without the author’s knowledge and only just in time, to a member of the jury for the Ingeborg Bachmann competition.

    I was invited to the competition in Klagenfurt, but didn’t want to go, because although I had the courage to write, I lacked it to appear in front of a television audience. In five minutes I learned what PR is and also that small, but classy publishing houses need it, too.

    I won the prize by accident because the favourite was disqualified, upsetting the balance of the jury. In such cases they like to get behind outsiders. I was a no name. A joker.

    On 31 July 1990, the day of the currency reform, the unknown Birgit Vanderbeke became, at a stroke, a well-known author in the German-speaking world.

    The Mussel Feast appeared at the end of August and was immediately pulled to pieces by everyone – furiously, sometimes angrily, sometimes polemically and spitefully, too. Even in Germany, where reviews can often be vicious, such an onslaught is rare for a debut novel. On the verge of reunification, German euphoria was at its zenith. Although my book was read and butchered as a family story, there was something else in there, something which wasn’t just private, but political. And in no way euphoric.

    I was not the only one to be attacked; that same summer the German literary critics did all in their power – and with some success – to destroy the ‘grand old lady’ of East German literature, Christa Wolf. In her novella, What Remains, Christa Wolf had tried to look back and reassess the past carefully and seriously, instead of joining in with the German–German rejoicing and wooing her readers with the idea of ‘blooming landscapes’, which Chancellor Helmut Kohl had promised his brothers and sisters in the East.

    On 3 October 1990, reunification day, the Frankfurt Book Fair was taking place. The first print run of The Mussel Feast had been fairly modest and sold out quickly. In that year this sort of thing was a catastrophe for literary publishers, for all the printers in the country had huge contracts. The new German Länder needed new school text books, and these had to be printed in a hurry. I missed the Christmas market, and in the first of many annual royalty statements I saw the figure, inked in by hand, of 8,028 copies sold.

    But the booksellers loved this book; I was invited to hundreds of readings. The readers loved it. After some years in which the German landscape didn’t bloom at all (my financial situation did, however, and splendidly) and the initial enthusiasm had given away to a severe hangover, the critics forgot that they had torn the book to shreds. In the meantime it had become a great success in Spain and Italy, and I had left Germany. The Mussel Feast helped me buy a little house in France, and one day my little book, the outsider, which had been born in a historical no man’s land, became a classic and appeared on school reading lists.

    By the way, no one knows exactly how this mussel metaphor works, because I haven’t told anyone. 

    And isn’t it normal for pupils to hate the authors whose books they have to read?

    About the Author

    Birgit Vanderbeke, born in 1956, is one of Germany’s most successful literary authors. She has written 17 novels. The Mussel Feast – Das Muschelessen-  was her first publication and won the most prestigious German language literature award, The Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. The book was published in 1990 and has never been out of print since. It has been translated into all major European languages, including French, Spanish and Italian.

    About the Translator

    Jamie Bulloch has already translated Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by FC Delius (Peirene No 3) and Sea of Ink by Richard Weihe (Peirene No 9) for Peirene. He has worked as a professional translator from German since 2001. He is also the author of A Short History of Tuscany and Karl Renner: Austria.

    Additional Information

    Birgit Vanderbeke is one of a stellar line-up of writers who have been selected to read at this year’s European Literature Night in London on 15th May. European Literature Night London takes place on 15 May 2013 at the British Library, for more information  please visit the British Library website and the Eunic website.

    Jachym Topol will also be part of the ELN delegation, you can read his PEN Atlas piece online.

    The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, translated by Jamie Bulloch is published by Peirene Press.