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  • With this Novel, I Return: An Interview with Rafik Schami

    With this Novel, I Return: An Interview with Rafik Schami

    Syrian-German novelist Rafik Schami discusses liberty, storytelling, language and exile.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    I’ll start with something large: freedom. Sophia, your latest novel, seems to have forms of freedom – personal, national, religious, political – at its centre. How do these forms of liberty interact?

    Sophia is a novel about freedom and its oppression under a dictatorship. It’s less about abstract debate than about the fate of people: freedom shapes people and empowers them to perform higher tasks; their oppression deforms them and reduces their goals to bare survival. But freedom is indivisible. One cannot be politically free if one is religiously or nationally unfree. One can pretend or imagine that one is free in an unfree society because of one’s wealth, but one is, ultimately, a slave of the oppressors. One can lose all rights and wealth, and find oneself, the next day, in prison.

    These interactions are realised through formal, generic ones. Sophia is, at bottom, thrilling, novelistic storytelling: it’s driven by plot, epic forms, and it’s readily readable and consumable. But it’s also deeply ideological (or, perhaps, ideocritical). You write about heavy things via lightness, and I want to ask how the parts of your self – the political thinker and the storyteller – combine in the act of writing?

    With this question, you touch upon a very important decision I have made for my writing. Many literary critics will wake up only in the next century, and understand that it is possible to tell complicated stories with lightness and to avoid boredom and moral preaching, even when the content or subject matter is heavy. My hope is completely fulfilled knowing that my readers love my books. Of course, as a political person, I fight for dignity, freedom, democracy and the preservation of nature, and against racism. And I believe that the more committed you are, the more exciting your writing will be. 

    What good will it do me if my readers throw down the book after three pages? But your question goes even deeper. I have always to put my humanitarian views aside in the development of the characters to ensure they remain credible and believable. This the case in Sophia: Salman is a complicated person, and at times appears as a swindler engaged in fraud. And that’s how he should appear. You can’t write a good novel with all the characters being angels.

    Readers of this conversation are receiving it in English. What’s your relationship to language – to German and Arabic? It strikes me as significant that you write in German, but that you founded Swallow Editions, a press that brings new Arabic voices to anglophone readers.

    I have a strong love affair with language. As a child, I spoke Aramaic with my parents, Arabic on the street and at school, and French in the Lebanese monastery (it was my father’s dream that I become a priest). Later, English was added (unfortunately taught by an unqualified teacher). So German became my fifth language. Arab publishers rejected my novels, so I decided to learn literary German and make it my language. It took me years to master it.

    My aim with Swallow Editions is to introduce the work of young, talented Arab novelists to the English-speaking world. Because the novels published under Swallow Editions are translated into English, they can reach a much wider audience. But I am also happy that all the novels are published in German language, too.

    Translation’s virtue rests in its ability to share contexts and narratives across national and linguistic borders – to foster understanding and exchange. But I want also to discuss the risk that carries. Political and military exchanges and interventions between Western Europe and the Middle East have been accompanied by certain (often problematic) narratives. Does literary exchange carry risks of imperialism and homogenisation? If so, how do we avoid them?

    Translation is a great – but underrecognised – art. The translation must reinvent the story, make it understandable to readers of another culture, without causing any loss of original substance. Unlike military intervention, which always destroys something, translation is an attempt to build a very delicate, sensible bridge. But, as soon as the translation puts the host country’s own national interests above the original language of a work, the bridge collapses. The damage remains small because it concerns only this one translation of the novel. If the original novel is a piece of art with enduring value, it will be discovered and translated correctly.

    For twenty years, I have rejected all offers from Arab publishers to publish my work, because they always want to make changes and censor my work. In my experience, if the translator censors or changes a work, they become a henchman of the dictatorship. However, after a long search, I found my current publisher, Manshourat al-Jamal of Camel Publications, who does not censor a word I write.

    In other interviews with you which I’ve read, the conversation has turned quickly from the literary to the strictly political. I’m aware that’s what I’ve just done, but I want to ask how you find that tendency – to talk to you as a writer, first, but hastily to ask you instead, as a Syrian in Germany, about the situation in Syria?

    Thank you for your very sensitive wording. I sometimes find it frustrating that some journalists come to their own conclusions or statements without having done their homework. Instead of taking their own stand against the dictatorship, they expect it from me. That is the reason why I reject many interviews. And this is also the reason why I only conduct interviews via email, which I can check very carefully. I often send the questions back unanswered. I have written a lot about, and have been very vocal against, dictatorship, but making myself a source of information for journalists who are unwilling to take the time to do proper research is a disposession of my literary work.

    And so, finally, to submit fully to that tendency, I want to ask about exile and return. I think of Salah Al-Hamdani, who also left the Arabic world for political imperatives in the 1970s, settled in Western Europe (France), and wrote about the country of his birth in the language of his adopted home. He frequently discusses his one return to Iraq, to see his family. This is something you’ve not been able yet to do. In 2011, you said that, should the Assad regime fall, you would ‘go back, but as a visitor’. How has this hope for return shifted in the last eight years?

    My answer remains the same: if I returned to the places of my childhood, I would only do so to see them again and share them with my wife and son. But after eight years of tragic war, the hope for a peaceful development has faded away. Sophia describes the impossibility of return. I have sewn all the experiences of my friends in exile, all my feelings, desires and fears, dreams and nightmares into the novel, and sent Salman on the journey that I always wanted and feared.

    With this novel, I return to Damascus. I don’t return physically, but with my longing. That’s what I’ve been doing for forty years.

    Rafik Schami was born in Damascus in 1946, came to Germany in 1971 to study, and stayed on to become a leading German novelist and a pivotal figure in the European migrant literature movement. His novels have been translated into over 40 languages and have received numerous international literary awards, including the Hermann Hesse Prize. His translated works published by Interlink include Damascus Nights, The Calligrapher’s Secret, A Hand Full of Stars, and The Dark Side of Love, which was a 2010 Winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal.

    Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

    Photo credit: Arne Wesenberg

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Saša Stanišić

    Interview by Tasja Dorkofikis.

    Before the Feast is set in Fürstenfelde, a small village in the former GDR, on the day before its annual feast. Why did you decide to set your story there? Do you know the area well? And is this central European location and scenery important to your writing?

    I had a mosaic kind of tale in mind which was based on a really small village in the Bosnian mountains, a place where the ancestors of my family lived for centuries. The village is on the verge of disappearing; only about 20 people live there today. I wanted to write the stories of those still remaining, the legends of the region, its beauty and horrors, in order to keep something, anything alive and save it from being forgotten.

    Soon I realized that this kind of approach was more of a documentary project than a fictional one. I continued the research but stopped the writing.

    The topics of decay, disappearance, life and death in remote areas didn’t cease to interest me even after my work in that village was done. And so I created my own village, in which I could write fictional prose as much as I liked, and placed it in Germany’s northeast where many problematic issues of German and European societies are visible – unemployment of the youth, a strong right-wing movement, the loneliness of old people and so on.

    I didn’t have a very deep knowledge of the region, which is why I spent a lot of time in Uckermark and did research, talked to people, read and learned. It is a region with a literary tradition of its own, but not much has been written in recent times.

    I found that many stories from ‘my’ ancestors’ village were very similar in their core to stories I was being told or researched in Uckermark. There is something beautiful in the fact that such different cultural landscapes share similar motives and story-telling devices, which in the end means that Europe is nothing more than a village itself. A big and angry one, eerie and manifold, but in the end just a village.

    You thank the people of Furstenberg, Furstenfelde and Furstenwalde at the end of your novel. How much is the book based on real local history?

    I actually never went to those places (except Fürstenwerder). The thank-you note is itself fiction, since everybody is always trying to find the ‘real’ in fiction.

    There is a bit of local history revolving around the end of World War II which I took as the background for one story; also bits of GDR history are relevant. But there is much more invented history and even pieces from Bosnia which I used and transferred to Germany without changing too many parameters.

    The book was never meant to be a fictional mirror of history. It even plays with the fact that history is always different depending on who is writing it. The winners, the losers, the historians, the authors of fictions.

    In the novel the local historical archive is mysteriously broken into and stories escape, allowing myths and memories flow through the village during the night. Why this fascination with collective memory and the past?

    As a writer I am fascinated by memory (and its flaws) as a constituent of our present lives. I cannot write honestly about a 90-year-old former soldier without trying to understand his views on war as a young man or his thoughts on the military and his own time spent with a weapon.

    Collective memory is a kind of a myth in itself. There is almost never such a thing as complete agreement on how historical events unfolded, because there is always that one person who will say, ‘I don’t believe,’ and, ‘This is how it went,’ no matter how much evidence would prove him wrong.

    Even written records are never complete and perhaps not even correct, or they’re forged; in any case, many might say they are not to be trusted. I like the mistrust.

    I like the flaws of remembrance and the insecurities of biographies. I am not interested in the past as a moment in time but in the present as a carryover of all the memories and dealings in and with the past.

    The village of Furstenfelde is in decline. Is writing about this place your way of keeping it alive?

    Not really. Maybe it would be so if it actually existed. While dealing with the past of the village of my ancestors, I realized that I am either a fiction writer, or a journalist or a museum curator, but never all of those things together.

    Also – unfortunately? – fiction can’t save much from disappearance. It might provide insight for those who are interested and maybe even create a good story which will forever become a part of the cultural heritage of a place, but only a fantasist would give it actual healing powers.

    This novel has a wonderfully rich host of local characters, from an aged painter, a teenage bell-ringer and a suicidal ex-soldier to the vixen who lives in the nearby forest. The reader has a strong feeling that the animals, people and landscape are all connected together. In fact, the book is often narrated by a collective ‘we’. Who are ‘we’ in the story? And why did you decide on this constantly shifting perspective?

    In creating a mosaic of a village I kind of wanted the mosaic itself to have a voice which was stronger than its singular pieces. Only a ‘we’ could provide such force.

    Also, ‘we’ is very often used in rural contexts, for example in conversations. It provides a sense of unity and agreement, and at the same time it divides ‘us’ (the villagers) from ‘them’ (the outside world), thus creating a strong group feeling which always has more credibility and strength than one single voice.

    The ‘we’ in the story is a kind of collective voice of the village itself. I tried to imagine how it would sound if all the people who ever lived in this place merged into one. It would be protective towards the village since it consists of the village, it would be harsh because times were mostly harsh, but it would also be sensible and even poetic because of all the sensible and poetic voices that have lived in Fürstenfelde. And so on: the aim was to create a kind of a choir with singers long dead and some still alive, always singing, because a village is never quiet, not even in its darkest hours.

    You arrived in Germany with your parents at the age of 14, having fled the war in former Yugoslavia. You now write your books in German. Beyond the Feast is stylistically very rich with wonderfully surprising changes in tone and timescale. Tibor Fischer in the Independent said that you manage to ‘put a bit of Balkan fun into the Reich’. Do you think that the fact that German is your second language contributes to your linguistic inventiveness? How has your mother tongue affected your writing?

    Not much really. I have no idea what Balkan fun actually is, I lived there only for those 14 years and the last one or two were not really fun. People tend to believe that writing has much to do with our biographical upbringing. That might be true for some people but for me writing only has to do with the actual topic I am writing about. For me a good writer of fiction is someone who can adapt to any milieu, setting, person and bring it to life on the page – no matter how far away this milieu, setting and person is from the writer’s background.

    So the answer would be: I am linguistically inventive because the language is there to be linguistically reinvented – if, and only if, it works for a story and a character’s way of speech.

    How do you feel about your adopted homeland?

    It is very hard to think about such a complicated, manifold, unreal construct as a ‘country’ as if it were a hat. Even hats are not really simple. But simpler than ‘Germany’. I’ll try:

    I don’t really know how I feel about the very complicated hat Germany. It is colourful. To wear it makes me happy at times, sad at times, angry at times, confused at times. I like to wear it because it doesn’t really fit me or anyone else. Sometimes I must lift it for couple of weeks and put another hat on since it tends to get narrower over time. France is a good alternative hat.

    Anthea Bell, who translated both your novels, is a wonderful translator. She has been widely praised for this and for her other translations. How do you work with her and with your other translators?

    There are no words to describe the beauty, precision and literary quality of Anthea’s work. May she live and translate forever.

    I enjoy working with translators in general. They are the best readers: very focused and critical.

    Find out more about Before the Feast, published by Pushkin Press.

    Find out more about How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone on English PEN’s World Bookshelf including a free, downloadable reading guide.

  • Letter to Britain

    Dear Britons,

    You almost killed my father. He was a boy of nine years. He was sitting in a bunker with his mom in Hamburg, during Operation Gomorrha, and while the city above them vanished in a fire storm so hot that the people outside the bunker doors merged with the melting tar they were standing on, underneath the streets the water pipes burst and my late grandmother and my dad had to swim up to the dim light of the glowing ashes of what they had come to know as their world.

    Later, my dad became a scientist. He is on Facebook. You should connect, he is a cool guy. And you know what? You could easily connect with him, because being a scientist nowadays means that he publishes in your language. His English is quite good. And not only his.

    When I was on a literature festival in Budapest last year, I met writers from Portugal, Italy, Hungary, Holland, Belgium, Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria. We were sitting at a large square of tables discussing various aspects of working with language, and it took two hours until I realized the irony in this setting: we were all speaking English, even the French guy, but there was not a single person from an English-speaking country present.

    I don‘t know if you are aware of this: the whole continent speaks your language. You can go anywhere on this landmass inhabited by 500 million people and ask for directions, or beer, or the next English pub (they are everywhere) and you will be understood.

    Everybody loves your national sport. We all know the name of your head of state and the melody of your national anthem, and, for some reason I do not get, when your princess gives birth it is a headline in all our news outlets.

    And you are seriously considering leaving us? I cannot understand this.

    I mean, I don‘t care much about your princess, or her baby. I do not really like your food. And, being born in Munich, I can never forgive Manchester United for Barcelona 1999. Or for Schweinsteiger 2015.

    But there is one feeling that is stronger than all this. I am not sure how to describe it, but I think it has something to do with what my father said one day, when I was 12 years old and came home from school where I had just heard about Hamburg 1943, and my maths was already good enough to realize that 1943 is after 1934, the year of my father‘s birth, and I said, dad, how could they do this, and he said they had to. For you.

    It took me many years to understand what he meant. But I do now. I am grateful for the democracy, the solidarity and the freedom you brought us 70 years ago, and which the German people is so used to that we tend to forget where they came from.

    Today, these values are threatened again, in Germany and everywhere else on the continent. But this time it will be much easier to defend them. If we fight together.

    Yours,

    Heinz Helle

    AppleMark
    Heinz Helle was born in 1978. He studied philosophy in Munich and New York. He has worked as a copywriter for advertising agencies, and is a graduate of the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel. His debut novel Superabundance is published on 25 February 2016.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Jenny Erpenbeck

    Interview with Tasja Dorkofikis, PEN Atlas editor.

    Your books are steeped in history and historical events. In The Visitation, the main protagonist is a house, and you deal with the way its inhabitants are influenced by historical events. The main character in The End of Days cannot escape history either. Why is history so important to you and your fiction?

    It was not my original idea to write about history when I started to write – but while working on my first stories, which were based on my family history, it became more and more clear to me that no private world exists beyond the so-called ‘big history’. There are so many stories in my family about fleeing, leaving things behind, separation of family members during the war – so there has always been a strong sense of the importance of politics in my family, a sense of what’s behind the small things in a single person’s life. You can see every family as a kind of kaleidoscope of mankind and, especially if you happen to be a writer, it’s like a treasure that nourishes you: gathered around the coffee table you will find all the different perspectives you need to understand things a bit more deeply. And of course all the changes I myself experienced after the fall of the wall were also very important for me to feel – not only to know, but to feel – what it means to be all of a sudden cut off from your origins.

    How much research goes into your books? And how do you select which events you will use in your books?

    It’s fascinating for me to find out how the life I’m writing about really felt. Not only when or where something took place, but what jokes were told, the smell of a building, the sound of someone’s laughter and so on. If I find a 70-year-old mosquito between the pages of a document, it’s also part of the research. I love to sit in archives, I love to talk to people, I love to read books, fiction and non-fiction – in order to find something I hadn’t been looking for. Research is an adventure and a gift – I consider it my privilege to have a profession that allows me to take the time to find those treasures and to pass them to the reader. Sometimes you might find things that are different from what you expected, but it’s always worth facing them and making something out of them rather than inventing something that fits your ideas better. In the end the choice of which factual material you put in the text depends on the heart of your thoughts. The research must work with the original concept to create the story you want to tell – and the story of course will be affected by the research.

    The End of Days follows a family history in Eastern Europe before the First World War through the life of one woman. You are inventive with time and fate and your main character experiences many possible lives and outcomes. At the beginning the mother finds out ‘a day on which a life comes to an end is still far from being the end of days’. You imagine that your main character is saved and does not die as an eight-month-old baby and she grows up to experience various horrors of European 20th
    -century history. Despite cheating fate, your character avoids death only for a short while.  Do you wonder whether in this case the early death would have been a preferable fate? And how do you choose this moment of possible change in a character’s life?

    It’s not all about tragedy – it’s also about giving a new life to the main character in every chapter of the book and about the importance of different influences in different phases of her life, about decisions she makes herself and about how she manages to get through the hard times when decisions are made for her. It is especially during these hard times that you have to face the question of how to retain your integrity and your senses. Often it’s sorrow that enriches our lives. I think in everybody’s life you can find those big changes, paths chosen as well as avoided or missed – passages for which the death in my book is only a synonym. Sometimes it depends on the place where you live, sometimes it has to do with the relationships you have, your family, your love, your professional development, your engagement in politics. But even in one single day you’re not just one: I’m doing my work, I’m a mother, a woman, a friend, a customer, a passenger on a train… There are so many layers in every single moment.

    Mapping out these possible lives and biographies must have been very complicated. How did you choose this structure? Did you decide at the very beginning that you would give your character five possible options?

    When I started to think about writing the book I wrote some 10 or 12 beginnings. But then I decided to try the version with the five possible deaths and lives and I of course had to be clear about the basic settings – things like time, place and circumstances. At that point I also had to think about the reasons for every death: like illness, love, politics, accident or just old age. But everything else happening within the chapters I explored only while writing. And the more the book grew the more complex it became – so it was like going back again to add some detail in one of the former lives, so that the connection between them became closer. I like the idea that one could read the book more as a circular than as a straight narrative.

    There are many hidden events and secrets in your book.  A violently anti-Semitic attack is never openly admitted in the family. The main character’s son in one of the versions of her life ‘carries around with him a vast dark land: all the stories his mother never told him or that she hid from him; perhaps he even carries with him those stories his mother never knew or heard of’. Do you think that being open about the past helps the healing process?

    Keeping secrets might be a way to balance something for a short while, but one always has to be aware that it’s also a way to use power. Keeping a secret makes an object out of someone who should and might be a partner.

    The End of Days has no conventional plot and no obvious hero or heroine. Your main character remains nameless throughout most of the book. Why do you often choose to write about nameless characters?

    To me there seems to be a certain element of fashion in choosing a character’s name in a work of fiction – I don’t like that.  A name itself doesn’t say very much: it’s a bit like a mask. In many cases it tells much more about the taste of the writer than about the character who is given the name. What I liked about the namelessness of my main character in the book is that she instead gets titles like: daughter, lover, wife, comrade, mother, grandmother and so on. That shows much better than a name that a human being is growing, or in motion, or in change, and this interests me much more than a name.

    Do you see yourself as a German writer or even as an East German writer? Does the past division into West and East Germany still mean something in German literature?

    Since no one can change his or her past I’ll always stay someone who grew up and has been formed by a foreign country – even when my passport is and has always been a German one. For the next generations it’ll be different. As a writer I see myself as one among many others sitting at their desks somewhere in the world – not just in Europe.

    What are your literary influences?

    There are of course many German speaking authors among my favourites like Büchner, Kafka, Stifter, E.T.A. Hoffmann – but also a whole bunch of translated authors like Majakowski, Gabriel García Márquez, Edgar Lee Masters, Proust or the ancient Ovid.

    Your books have been translated into many languages. Susan Bernofsky is your English translator. How do you work with her and with other translators?

    Susan Bernofsky is the translator of all of my books into English – so we have known each other for many, many years now: travelling together, giving workshops and readings, visiting each other every year at least once and, of course, sending many emails back and forth. I have always had the feeling of a deep understanding between us not only in terms of the content of a story but also concerning the rhythm of the language, the sound of the words, the ‘speed’ or ‘slow motion’ in a sentence or passage, the hidden humour, the kind of vocabulary both of us love – and, last but not least, the thinking.

    Described as ‘one of the finest, most exciting authors alive’ by Michel Faber, Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. She has worked on opera and musical productions and her fiction has been translated worldwide. She is the author of The Old Child & The Book of Words, The Visitation and The End of Days, for which she and translator Susan Bernofsky received the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

    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.

    Jenny Erpenbeck announced as the winner of the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize via Booktrust.

    Read more about The End of Days and buy it through our book partner Foyles on the World Bookshelf.

  • 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.

  • The present of the past of things

    Patricio Pron writes a moving piece for PEN Atlas, about an encounter in a small German city that made him reflect on collective guilt, individual responsibility and the nature of the past – both for a person and a country

    Translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem

    Some time ago I visited an elderly couple who lived on the outskirts of a small German city. I had never met them, but I already knew some things about them: I knew that they were my girlfriend’s paternal grandparents, that they were readers of Theodor Fontane, that he had been a teacher, that it had been a while since my girlfriend had last visited them. They lived in a small flat with views of a motorway with little traffic and they made exquisite conversation, the result of a life of readings that had left their mark on them and that they recounted without the slightest affectation as they sliced up the customary cake, served the coffee and showed an interest in us, as if there were anything interesting about our lives.

    The day after visiting them we received a card in which the old man thanked me for the Fontane book I’d bought in an antiques shop and given to him the day before, in a gesture that was perhaps antiquated but that I nonetheless (or maybe for that very reason) found particularly moving. Before that, and shortly after we said goodbye to them at the end of what for me had been one of the best afternoons to date of my stay in Germany, my girlfriend told me a story about her grandfather: he’d been drafted during the war; he had fought on the Eastern front and on the Western, involuntarily moving up in the army ranks, due to the desertion or death of his superiors; in France, in the face of the Allies’ advance, he had surrendered himself: he’d forced a subordinate to switch his regular soldier’s uniform for his officer’s one; the subordinate had been shot by a firing squad, he had escaped with his life.

    Neither my girlfriend nor her father knew the story well, (in fact) they preferred not to talk about it; of course, her father and she were very familiar with German responsibility in the tragic events between 1933 and 1945 and they had internalised the guilt that plagues Germans since then, but, even knowing about that guilt, they seemed little interested in finding out about the personal responsibility of a member of their family in those events. Actually (I thought) their recognition of German guilt in the tragic events of the first half of the 20th
    century is what kept them from evaluating that individual responsibility, it was the excuse to not dig deeper into the family story, to not confront the old man with facts that didn’t exist outside of German history (as if they occupied, for example, the back room of a building known only by its facade), but rather were German history itself, stripped of rhetorical strategies, devoid of sociological and political arguments that explain it, converted into family history and into destiny.

    There, I now think, was where it all began for me. Not necessarily in the story of that old man who I met one afternoon on the outskirts of a small German city and who died some years later, but rather in the confrontation between individual responsibility and collective guilt that I considered for the first time that afternoon and in what that confrontation had to say about my own country, where those responsible for the murder of thirty thousand people during the military dictatorship had been tried and then freed in name of the same argument that presided over the German way of thinking of the past, that the recognition of collective guilt exempted the army from elucidating individual responsibility.

    I hadn’t returned to Argentina for years and I was perfectly aware of how spot-on Stuart Hall was, when he wrote that “migration is a one-way trip” since there is “no ‘home’ to go back to”. When I returned to Argentina, however, while I couldn’t shake the story of that old man and the unanswered questions left by his death, which no one would ever be able to resolve (Was the story true? What was the name of his subordinate, the one who died in his name allowing him to survive? Were his nights filled with regret, with satisfaction, with indifference, with relief?), I thought I was returning to the past, to my country’s past (which I knew was bloody) and to my own family’s past, their participation in the tragic events of Argentina’s past (and how they had managed to escape death) that my parents and my siblings and I had pretended to have forgotten for too long; I was going back, I told myself, to the past, but, at the same time, it began to be increasingly clear that it was impossible for me to go back to the past, since, actually, I had never completely left it behind and it travelled with me wherever I went: that (in the end) it was there wherever I was, including in a flat in a small German city, one afternoon, in the words unsaid by an old man that would serve as my impetus to tell the story of what I had seen and heard and of how I had seen and heard it, in a country that was for me the past; which is to say, the present.

    About the Author

    Patricio Pron, born in 1975, is the author of three story collections and four previous novels, and he also works as a translator and critic. His fiction has appeared in Granta, Zoetrope and The Paris Review, and has received numerous prizes, including the Juan Rulfo Short Story Prize, the Jaén Novel Award, and the 2008 José Manuel Lara Foundation Award for one of the five best works published in Spain that year. He was one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists of 2010. He lives in Spain.

    His most recent novel My Fathers’ Ghost is Climbing in the Rain is out now,  “a daring, deeply affecting novel about the secrets buried in the past of an Argentine family. It is a story of fathers and sons, the impending death of a parent, corruption and responsibility, memory and history, with a mystery at its heart.”

    About the Translator

    Mara Faye Lethem has translated novels by David Trueba, Albert Sanchez Piol, Javier Calvo, Patricio Pron and Pablo De Santis, among others. Her translations have appeared in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2010, Granta, The Paris Review and McSweeneys. She is currently working on a novel by Marc Pastor.

    Additional Information

    Photo of Patricio Pron, credited to Luna Miguel (Madrid, March 2010)

    Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) was a German novelist and poet, regarded by many as the most important 19th century German-language realist writer. 

     http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=0141392177

  • 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.