“And until you have possessed
dying and rebirth,
you are but a sullen guest
on the gloomy earth.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (NOV 22, 2011)

Bolaño cites this quotation from Goethe (also given in German) towards the end of this early but posthumously discovered novel. It is as good a key as any to what the book may be about. The protagonist, Udo Berger, a German in his mid-twenties, is literally a guest — in a hotel. He is taking a late summer vacation with his girlfriend Ingeborg in a beach hotel on the Costa Brava where he used to come with his family as a child. Together with another German couple, Hanna and Charly, they engage in the usual occupations: swimming, sunbathing, eating, drinking (a lot), and making love. But shadows hang over this idyll. They become involved with a group of slightly sinister local men, called The Wolf, The Lamb, and El Quemado (the burnt one), a hideously-burned South American immigrant who hires out pedal boats on the beach. Their contentment is marred by small acts of offstage violence, and by an unexpected death that touches them more directly. Udo will stay on until the hotel is about to close for the season, a change in atmosphere that is summed up by Bolaño in itchily discordant images:

“The regular muted sound of the elevator has been replaced by scratching and races behind the plaster of the walls. The wind that every night shakes the window frame and hinges is more powerful. The faucets of the sink squeak and shudder before releasing water. Even the smell of the hallways, perfumed with artificial lavender, breaks down more quickly and turns into a pestilent stink that causes terrible coughing fits late at night.”

The biggest shadow of all is that cast by the title, The Third Reich. We learn early on that it is the name of a war game played with counters on a stylized map. The war that the game replays is a purely military operation of armies, deployments, and supply lines; the text has no hint of Nazi ideology or the Holocaust. Yet those associations are inevitably in the mind of the reader, who waits for some at least symbolic equivalent to surface, for the dream holiday to become a nightmare. And Bolaño, who is a master at generating angst from a meticulous compilation of detail, makes a fine start to building the tension here. Udo is the German national champion of war-gaming. Like one of those solipsistic characters out of Ishiguro, he is obsessed in his hermetic world, working out variants of the games, publishing them in obscure magazines, corresponding with gamers in other countries. Alone of the German quartet, he remains pale while the others develop suntans, since he prefers working in his room to lounging on the beach. There is a danger in him, a potential for mental instability, at least as great as any threat posed by the low-life characters with whom the four associate.

This is a beautifully produced book with an evocatively surreal cover and a fluid translation by Natasha Wimmer. I leaped into it the moment it arrived and truly wanted to like it. But I have to say that, for all the fascinating hints of ideas he would develop in The Savage Detectives and especially in 2666, this is not vintage Bolaño. It seemed to be all wind-up and no punch. As so often with Bolaño, there is a surreal element competing with the meticulous realism, but here I felt they canceled each other out rather than reinforcing. Udo, of course, lives much of his time in a totally irreal world, “essentially ghosts of a ghostly General Staff, forever performing military exercises on game boards.” Ingeborg, his girlfriend, is forever reading a mystery featuring the detective Florian Linden, but although reportedly near the end she never reaches it. A vacation involving so great a consumption of alcohol is in itself somewhat unreal, and Udo’s imagination verges increasingly on paranoia. Yet while nightmares, in the sense of actual dreams, play a larger and larger part in the story, the nightmare fails to materialize in reality; the book ends in distinct anticlimax.

All the same, I do see the point of the Goethe quotation. “Dying and rebirth” are certainly among the ideas in play, and Udo is a different person at the end. The novel makes a fascinating addendum for existing fans of Bolaño’s work. But though it is an easy read, even lighthearted at times, I would not recommend it as an introduction for those who do not know the author. For them, and especially for those leery of tackling the vast scale of his major works, I would suggest the novella By Night in Chile, whose compact power is merely hinted at here.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 24 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (November 22, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Roberto Bolano
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: 2666

Bibliography (translations only):

• The Third Reich (1989; 2011 in US)
• Distant Star (1996; 2004 in US)
• Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996: 2009 in US)
• The Savage Detectives (1998; 2007 in US)
• Monsieur Pain (1999; 2010 in US)
• By Night in Chile (2000; 2003 in US)
• Assassin Whores (2001; 2010 in US)
• 2666 (2004; 2008 in US)
• Amulet (2006; 2007)
• Last Evenings on Earth: Stories (2007)
• The Skating Rink (2009)
• Antwerp (April 2010)
• The Insufferable Gaucho (2010)
• Between Parentheses (2011)
• The Secret of Evil (2011; April 2012 in US)
• Woes of the True Policeman (November 2012 in US)

“He will rub at his eyes, rub away the unsatisfactory aspect of the world. Then he will blink at me. He blinks until I am back in focus… He sits up straighter, moves himself into the edge of the table. He is back to wishing there was more of me, more of me to see.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (SEP 28, 2011)

Who is Ines, the illegal African migrant who embarks on a hazardous sea crossing to Italy and Germany in search of her stolen son? At first, she is a total enigma; we keep wishing there was, indeed, more of her to see. Slowly and painstakingly, her inner identity is revealed in this haunting new book by Lloyd Jones, author of the acclaimed Mister Pip.

When we first meet her, Ines is working as a maid in a tony Tunisian resort, where women routinely supplement their wages with “hotel sex.” In the first few pages, we learn that she is seduced and impregnated by a callous black German guest, Jermayne, who tricks her into signing adoption papers for him and his wife. What Jermayne does not anticipate is that Ines will put herself in the hands of people-traffickers who launch her on a journey to the Sicilian coast, where she is arrives “bitten as a sodden sea cucumber.” From there, she makes her way to Berlin.

This story is revealed in bits and dabs, through successive narrations of an unscrupulous truck driver, a group of mostly benevolent alpine hunters, a British film researcher, a selfless French poet, and finally, a blind German man whose father may have been complicit in the war horrors. It is only after the first 120 pages that we meet the three key narrators: Ralf (the blind man), Defoe (his other lodger) and finally, Ines herself.

It’s an intriguing way to reveal Ines, a woman who is driven by motherly love and who will do anything and everything to spend time with her stolen son, Daniel, including betraying the trust of those who give her shelter and devotion. Like an old-fashioned detective story – in modern and sparse prose – we discover the contradictions between the narratives, what is real and what isn’t, and who Ines really is, deep down inside.

There is a beautiful symmetry about this book. In the first few pages, Lloyd Jones reveals the stuff that Ines is made of. She buys a parrot, that she quickly tires of, and tries to sell it. When that proves impossible she places the parrot on a skiff as it “rolled its eye up to her, to look as though it possibly understood her decision and had decided it would choose dignity over fear.” Much later on, Ines’s constant harping to see her son is described as parrot-like; she, too, chooses dignity as the best way to go.

The sparseness of the prose – the distance from Ines – places the reader at a bit of a distance. At times the narrative sags under the weight with a sense of inertia. Yet every time it slows down to a snail’s pace, something – some action, some decision, some revelation – creates more forward momentum. As a reader, I felt as if I were on a slow-moving train that suddenly picked up speed and oh, look at the view!

Lloyd Jones reveals a sense of daring and experimentation that shows he has come quite a way since Mister Pip – a book I enjoyed greatly. This subtle book is, in turn, riveting, disquieting, and haunting as we follow Ines’s odyssey to become reunited with her son. It reminded me a little bit of Chris Cleave’s Little Bee in its tautness and ability to summon up emotion. Lloyd Jones is definitely a writer to watch… and it does makes me curious about the many books still unpublished in the U.S. Maybe it is time that they share some of his short story collections.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA; Reprint edition (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lloyd Jones
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:Nalo Hopkinson

Bibliography:

• Gilmore’s Diary (1985)
• Splinter (1988)
• Swimming to Australia, and Other Stories (1991)
• Biofrafi: An Albanian Quest (1993)
• This House Has Three Walls (1997)
• Choo Woo (1998)
• Book of Fame (2000)
• Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (2002)
• Paint Your Wife (2004)
• Mr. Pip (2006; 2007 in US)
• The Man in the Shed: Stories (2009)
• Hand Me Down World (2010; September 2011 in US)

“I didn’t believe in demons; I ranked them with ghosts and vampires and werewolves, as products of a fevered imagination, or phenomena with a perfectly rational explanation. I did not realize yet, that summer when I was seventeen and my sister Polly was still alive, when the sun was shining and even the wind was warm and my whole body was restless, that there are worse things than being stuck in a small town for a year.  There are demons, and they are more terrible than we can imagine.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (AUG 27, 2011)

The narrator’s father, Dr. Oliver Fox, a professor seeking fame and fortune, provides the catalyst for the eerie and violent events of Linden’s second (after The Vanishing of Katharina Linden) novel, a finely crafted literary tale of psychological terror.

But it’s the narrator herself, his 17-year-old daughter Lin, who finds herself at the center of it all, trying to control events that threaten to tear her family apart, events that are far beyond her understanding, much less her ability to manipulate. Indeed, her attempts to take matters into her own impatient hands make things worse.

From the first page, we know people will die, including Lin’s sister Polly.

“If anyone were to ask me, ‘What is the root of all evil?’ I would say not ‘Money,’ but ‘Food.’ It was food – specifically the lack of it – that killed my sister, or at least assisted at the death. And the old man that day in the orchard in Niederburgheim was the only person I have ever seen who died of eating an apple.”

Grant opens the novel with the Fox family – Oliver, his wife Tuesday, Lin, Polly and baby brother Reuben – nearly at the end of their road trip from their home in England to a small rural town in Germany.

A local historian has invited Oliver to come and research the famous, exquisite Allerheiligen stained glass, medieval masterpieces which have been lost to the world for more than 200 years and may well have been destroyed. They are also, legend has it, haunted, by the demon Bonchariant.

Lost, they pull to the side of the road to ask directions, but the man who appears to be sleeping in an apple orchard is actually dead (probably having fallen off his ladder), an apple with one bite taken beside him, the ground oddly littered with glass sparkling in the sunlight.

Oliver, unwilling to get involved, drives on, leaving the body for someone else to discover. Eventually they find the crumbling castle they have rented so Oliver can conduct his research from a suitably atmospheric base. These priceless windows will make Oliver’s reputation if he can only find them, but to begin with he is unable even to find the local man who invited him to come.

Eventually he tracks down the man’s address but Herr Heinrich Mahlberg no longer lives there. He has recently died, having suffered an accident in his bath. The other locals are not nearly as welcoming as Herr Mahlberg promised to be. One local historian offers to share his notes – handwritten in German – but assures Oliver he is wasting his time as the windows were destroyed by the French in the 19th century, the letter describing the destruction itself destroyed in the last war’s bombings.

Meanwhile Lin (who speaks fluent German) has started school and been thrown together with the boy next door – or, in this case, the boy on an uninviting farm the other side of the spooky woods. Michel drives her to school each morning, his crush painfully obvious, and unrequited.

Threats against the family mount as their isolation increases. Inexplicable events – all involving broken bits of glass – begin to loom larger as the family feels itself hounded by superstition or, as Lin begins to think, by the Bonchariant demon who inhabits the famous glass.

Mostly unable to speak the language and shunned by the locals, the atmosphere thickens around the isolated Fox family, while Lin finds herself becoming more deeply swept up in the ancient myths surrounding the glass.

Grant uses a winning combination of psychological tension and local folkloric atmosphere to advance her tale, building suspense and dread as she goes, much as she did in her first novel.

There is one problem however, which may not bother the YA audience the story is at least partly aimed at. Lin is a sulky teenager and for me at least, this grows tiresome. She’s always complaining about mess and other peoples’ self-centeredness but never lifts a finger to help with all the chores that don’t get done, or get left to her anorexic sister, Polly.

However, Grant delivers a smashing conclusion and by the end of the book most readers will have forgiven Lin her teen brattiness.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bantam; Original edition (June 14, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Helen Grant
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

Bibliography:

• The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (2009; 2010 in US)
• The Glass Demon (2010; June 2011 in US)
• Wish Me Dead (2011 in UK)

“Until now, she had taken for granted that she had moral courage, but suddenly she didn’t know if it was possible to defer moral courage, conserve it, and if it would still be there for her, or if each moment like this would take her into another silent agreement, and another yet, until she’d find herself agreeing to what she’d never imagined, and she would have to adjust what she believed about herself.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (JUN 28, 2011)

In her new novel, Children and Fire, Ursula Hegi tells the story of Thekla Jansen, a teacher in the fictional German village of Burgdorf, familiar to readers of the author’s previous novels. Taking for the most part the perspective of her heroine, Hegi explores, from the inside out so to say, the emotional confusion and moral dilemmas that Germans were confronted with after the Nazis’ rise to power. The author sets the historical stage effectively, and while alluding to pivotal events, she focuses her attention on one specific day in February 1934, a day that, while starting off like any other, ends with the Burgdorf residents shocked, emotionally scarred and deeply divided…

Thekla, privately critical of the regime’s new politics, wavers when it comes to speaking about her views. Most of her thinking and questioning is realized through her almost continuous inner monologue: “How much must I try to find out? Once you know, it’s tricky to keep the knowing at bay, to press it back into the before-knowing[…][O]r can I decide to be satisfied with not knowing beyond what we are told?” Questions like these are vivid in her mind. She knows, for example, that she was given her teaching position only because her own former teacher and admired mentor, Fräulein Siderova, was fired because she is Jewish. Yet, Thekla refuses to dwell on any rationale and instead, in her mind, explains herself to the older teacher: she accepted the position “temporarily” until… Until when? “It can’t last. Once the regime wears itself down, I’ll get back to my own moral compass, to who I was before.”

The author effectively illustrates Thekla’s dilemma and ambivalence by taking the reader into the centre of her day’s activities: the classroom. Seeing the majority of “her boys” enthusiastically showing off the brown shirts of the “Hitler Jugend,” she wonders how she can guide the children on a path of tolerance and open-mindedness while at the same time accepting or even promoting their participation in a youth movement that preaches the opposite? She only wants what is best for the boys, she convinces herself. The effectiveness of the early Nazi propaganda exerted on the minds of the young is well exemplified by the boys’ behaviour. “Appalling, how much her boys expose about their families in all innocence. She would never turn them in, Still, others might.” Yet, to diffuse the attention to what has been revealed, she has the class recite a prayer for Hitler!

The young teacher’s indecision and willingness to conform may be rooted also in her background. Born as an illegitimate child to a teenage mother, and adopted by the man she called “Vati,” her childhood was divided between poverty at home and privilege offered by the wealthy Michel Abramowitz. Resented by her siblings and Michel’s children and their mother, she learned early on how to manoeuvre everything to her advantage. Despite persistent rumours that link her parentage to Michel, Thekla appears to be oblivious to or deliberately suppressing the truth of her half-Jewish heritage. How long can she pretend ignorance and go along with the increasingly vicious Nazi propaganda? How long can she be torn between being “repulsed” by the propaganda and “being sucked into the swirl of song and of fire, into the emotions of the mass, that passion and urgency, that longing for something beyond them, something great… ?”

Eventually, external events may force Thekla to confront who she really is: “What happens if you’re no longer who you believed you were? What do you do with the knowledge of that? And what if who you’re becoming goes against that you believed about yourself until you won’t remember who you were before?”

Children and Fire can be read at different levels. First and foremost it is the touching story of one young woman during the 1930s in Germany and her struggle to get ahead in life while staying true to her “moral centre.” At a deeper level, Hegi uses Thekla to ask complex questions of moral integrity and personal courage that were in front of more than one generation in Germany at the time, but may also have relevance for other crisis situations. For me the overall question remains whether a novel today, more than 75 years after the events, can deliver new aspects and insights that have not been addressed until now in the many books, fiction and non-fiction, written since, including Hegi’s own earlier novel Stones from the River. Readers will have different reactions to this question and, also, to the relevance of the novel in this regard. Hegi’s book is engaging and well written; with it she addresses successfully the range of moral questions that “ordinary people” might have struggled with at the time. For me the novel’s weaknesses are more on a structural level and have to do with balance between different strands of narrative, the prominence of the inner monologue over other ways of conveying the depth and drama of the story, and the ending which left me less than satisfied. Some factual details seem somewhat improbable to me, but these are minor in the overall picture.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (May 24, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ursula Hegi
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Hotel of the Saints

Bibliography:

• Intrusions (1981)
• Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories
• Salt Dancers (1995)
• Tearing the Silence: Being German in America (1997)
• Hotel of the Saints: Stories (2001)
• Sacred Time (2003)
• The Worst Thing I’ve Done (2007)

Burgdorf Cycle:

• Floating in My Mother’s Palm (1991)
• Stones from the River (1994)
• The Vision of Emma Blau (2000)
• Children and Fire (May 2011)

Children’s Books:

• Trudy and Pia (March 2003)

“I felt as if he were subject to some uncontrollable urge to offend the proprieties, break the most primitive commandments of morality and decency. Was he under a compulsion to name out loud things and feelings that were taboo according to the rules of civilized society? Or was it maybe just a symptom of senility? More precisely, the randiness of old age that Hochkeppel had mentioned?”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (JUN 17, 2011)

The German novel, The Stronger Sex by Hans Werner Kettenbach is ostensibly about a lawsuit–a very grubby lawsuit, but the story is really about the tangled relationships between the people involved in the case. Lawyer Alexander Zabel, in his late twenties, is rather surprised to find himself pressured into representing the elderly, ailing German industrialist, Herbert Klofft in a case involving his former employee, 34-year-old Katharina Fuchs. Katharina, an engineer who has worked in Klofft’s company, Klofft’s Valves, for eleven years was fired after requesting sick leave. According to Klofft, Katharina’s work had been slipping lately:

“She had repeatedly been late for work, he said, she had taken to leaving her desk for an hour or two in the middle of the day, or went home before the office closed at five. In general she had made it obvious, he claimed, that in contrast to the last ten years she was no longer particularly interested in her job, and considered the work more of a tedious necessity.”

Katharina was warned about her “conduct.” Then came a request for a week off for “private reasons,” and when pressed for an explanation she refused to elaborate. The time off was denied but Katharina took the week off anyway, and according to Klofft, who went to the extraordinary lengths of hiring a private detective to check on her whereabouts, she spent the week in a luxury Swiss spa with her lover. Even though she presented adequate medical documentation upon her return, Katharina was fired. Now there is a hearing scheduled at an employment tribunal, and Zabel will represent the Klofft company against Katharina Fuchs.

Once Zabel takes the case, the circumstances of what should be a fairly straight forward matter immediately become murky. Katharina was Klofft’s long-time mistress for ten years, but their relationship palled due to a combination of circumstances. Zabel asks himself if Katharina was fired by Klofft out of jealousy and spite, and as he pieces together evidence for the employment tribunal, he peels away layers of the Kloffts’ unhappy marriage. Although Klofft is Zabel’s client, Klofft’s wife, an attractive artist named Cilly, becomes a little too involved in the case, and just what Cilly wants from Zabel isn’t clear. When she drops vital information Zabel’s way, he’s presented with a dilemma: he can’t confide aspects of the case without betraying client confidentiality, and yet Cilly provides him with information that will help prepare for the hearing. Why does Cilly want to gain Zabel’s trust? Is she merely feeling pity for a young lawyer who is forced to deal with irascible, autocratic, adulterous husband, or is she, in effect, working against her husband’s desire to squash Katharina?

As the novel continues, an overwhelmed Zabel finds himself drawn into the Kloffts’ unhappy world. Although he’s initially repulsed by Klofft–a man whose fossilized attitudes towards women are offensive and repugnant–gradually the two men form a tentative relationship which unfolds over details regarding the impending hearing and also through a series of chess games. While the male characters are the novel’s power brokers, it’s the women who seem to remain recalcitrant, mysterious and elusive as they move just beneath the surface of the events that take place. Cilly certainly shakes up Zabel’s self-assurance, but there’s another indecipherable woman in the novel: Katharina. Although she’s the catalyst for the novel’s action, she’s seen only from a distance through the eyes of other people, and her motives are difficult to peg. If, by her actions, she set out to drive Klofft to jealous rage, then she succeeded, but perhaps Katharina was just trying to finally escape Klofft’s yoke and suffocating, unwelcome attentions.

For American readers, the novel raises some cultural issues. While Zabel expects a lawsuit to follow the employment tribunal hearing, the phrase “sexual harassment” was absent from the text, and written by an American, this would be an entirely different novel. The Stronger Sex is an exploration of moral choices and moral consequences, and while the males in the novel may think that they have the power that grants them the upper hand, the very elusiveness of the book’s female characters accords them a different kind of strength, and that issue is at the heart of the novel. (Translated by Anthea Bell.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bitter Lemon Press (May 17, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Publisher page on Hans Werner Kettenbach  Hans Werner Kettenbach (in German)
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Lie by Petra Hammesfahr

Bibliography (translated only):

• Black Ice (2006)
• David’s Revenge (2009)
• The Stronger Sex (May 2011)

“And I think it will be a good thing if I write everything down, because I’m an unusual person. I don’t mean a diary – that’s ridiculous for a trendy girl like me. But I want to write like a movie, because my life is like that and it’s going to become even more so. ”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (JUN 14, 2011)

There is nothing fake or “artificial” about the heroine of this surprising work of fiction. First published in 1932 in Germany, it was followed very quickly by its English translation in 1933. It was an immediate hit for a young author’s second novel; praised for its pointed sense of humour as well as the underlying critique of society. The story, written in the form of the central character’s musings and diary, blends a young woman’s daily struggles to make ends meet with, an at times sarcastic, yet always, witty commentary on daily life among the working classes during the dying days of the Weimar Republic.

Irmgard Keun cleverly uses her memorable character – Doris – who is as naïve as she is shrewd – to convey her own astute observations and critique of social and economic conditions of the time. While many aspects of the impending political disaster could not be predicted, Keun conveys her presentiments through Doris’s experiences. Despite the less than rosy picture it draws for Doris, the story is written in a deceptively light-hearted style, using the regional and working class colloquial language of her character with some Berliner phraseology and idioms thrown in. Keun’s vivid imagery and metaphors are often unexpected as they are hilarious. Kathie van Ankum’s new English translation captures Doris’s voice vividly and with great skill, even though Keun’s peculiar language with its grammatical mistakes and local idioms is close to impossible to transpose into another language.

Running out of options to subsidize her meagre income as a less than competent typist, Doris dreams of making it big in the movies. “I want to be a shine” (Ich will ein Glanz sein) is her ambition. She has the looks for it and her choice of boyfriends is aimed at having them provide the necessary accessories for her status as a glamour girl. Options appear to open when she lands a one-line action part against stiff competition. Unfortunately she gets carried away with her brief moment of “Glanz,” and walks off with a fur coat that “wants me and I want it – and now we have each other.”Sensuality is prominent when Doris describes fabric, often linking it to smell, objects and the people she meets.

Her closeness and loyalty to her former colleague and friend Therese is touching, relying on her as much as wanting to support her in turn. To escape being discovered with the fur coat, she leaves her mid-size town for Berlin, the centre of fashion, the arts and the movie business. Her luck goes up and down, depending on the circumstances and generosity of the current boyfriend. All the while she pines for her first and only love, Hubert. As soon as she feels settled into an almost “normal” life of some luxury with one partner, events force her to leave quietly or secretly. Yet, unflinchingly, she pursues her dream and the search for a Mister Right. Will she find him? As we follow Doris through a year’s seasons, we realize that we take in much more: Keun’s rich and detailed portrayal of Berlin and brilliant characterization of some of its multi-faceted people, always seen, of course, from Doris’s perspective.

Not surprisingly, given Keun’s topics and social critique, Keun’s books were blacklisted and all available copies confiscated in 1933. No longer able to publish Keun went into exile to Holland, where she continued to enjoy great popularity among other German exile friends. When Holland was invaded in 1940 she had to flee again. Reports of her suicide enabled her to return under cover to Germany, where she survived until the end of the war. Unfortunately, Keun could not rekindle the public’s interest in her writing; she died in 1982, lonely and poor. Her books were rediscovered decades later and have also benefited from recent re-translations. Reading it today, The Artificial Silk Girl (Das kunstseidene Mädchen) has lost nothing of its charm and relevance as a portrait of a working girl’s life in Berlin of 1932. It is a rare glimpse into a society on the brink of dramatic change, seen through the eyes of a working class young woman. (Translated by Kathie von Ankum.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Other Press (June 14, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Irmgard Keun
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More books brought back to life: Death of the Adversary by Hans Keilson Esther’s Inheritance by Sandor Marai

Translated Bibliography:

• Gilgi – One of Us (1931)
• The Artificial Silk Girl (1932; June 2011)
• Grown-ups Don’t Understand (1936)
• After Midnight (1937; May 2011)
• Child of All Nations (1938; March 2010)
• If We Were all Good: Stories (1950)

“As the time passed the Dodds found themselves confronting an amorphous anxiety that suffused their days and gradually altered the way they led their lives. The change came about slowly, arriving like a pale mist that slipped into every crevice. It was something everyone who lives in Berlin seemed to experience.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAY 19, 2011)

Before you even think of reading Erik Larson’s latest masterwork, clear your calendar, call in sick, send the kids to grandma’s, and place all your evening plans on hold. You will not want to come up for air until you’ve reached the last pages. It’s that good.

In his preface, Larson writes, “Once, at the dawn of a very dark time, an American father and daughter found themselves suddenly transported from their snug home in Chicago to the heart of Hitler’s Berlin. They remained there for four and a half years, but it is their first year that is the subject of the story to follow, for it coincided with Hitler’s ascent from chancellor to absolute tyrant, when everything hung in the balance and nothing was certain.”

The father was William E. Dodd, the mild-mannered and almost laughingly frugal history professor who became an unlikely choice as FDR’s pick for America’s first ambassador to Nazi Germany. The daughter was his bon vivant 24-year-old daughter, Martha, a beautiful and irrepressible woman of great physical appetites, who went along for the adventure of a lifetime. Their story is nothing short of extraordinary.

To quote Mark Twain: “Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.” Certainly, this is a story in which truth trumps fiction. Martha – a compatriot of literary legends Carl Sandburg and Thornton Wilder – quickly takes her place in German society. Larson writes, “As the daughter of the American ambassador she possessed instant cachet and in short order found herself sought after by men of all ranks, ages and nationalities.” One such pursuer was Rudolf Diels, the young chief of the Gestapo, a scarred, confident and charismatic man with penetrating eyes.

The other – one of the great loves of her life – was Boris, a senior agent for the NKVD, the precursor of the Soviet Union’s KGB. Although he is nominally married, he falls passionately for Martha and indeed, the two consider marrying.

In the meanwhile, her ambassador father is experiencing the crushing disillusionment of recognizing that the Germany of his college years has been taken over by a group of mad men. As a lone voice in the wilderness, he tries to voice concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home, encourage Roosevelt to censor the growing evil, and fight the backstabbing of the wealthy “Pretty Good Club” of affluent ambassadors who race from one glittery party to another. And astoundingly, he tries –without success – to refocus the State Department’s priorities; their “main concern about Germany remained its huge debt to America’s creditors.”

Through the eyes of history, we – the readers – know the eventual outcome of the story, and it’s viscerally painful to see all the junctures where Hitler’s nefarious plans could have been stopped – but weren’t. Like his magnificent Devil in the White City, this book is tautly told, with lots of foreshadowing, building suspense at every corner.

Ending about the time of “The Night of the Long Knives” – Hitler’s purge and the first act in the great tragedy of appeasement – this is an unforgettable look at life inside Germany in 1933 and 1934, through the eyes of a naïve but well-meaning American father and daughter. It is a tour de force about “complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1,639 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown (May 10, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Erik Larson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Day After Night by Anita Diamant Death of the Adversary by Hans Keilson

Bibliography:

• The Naked Consumer: How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities (1992)
• Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun (1995)
• Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History (1999)
• The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (2003)
• Thunderstruck (2006)
• In the Garden of the Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (May 2011)

“My assignment: get on the trail of Svensson the man.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (MAY 4, 2011)

Husbands and wives who work together either end up with their marriage in trouble or being the best of friends. In German author, Thomas Pletzinger’s novel, Funeral for a Dog, it’s the first scenario for journalist Daniel Mandelkern. Mandelkern is an ethnologist who is supposed to be writing “about anthropological concepts like matrilineality and male childbed,” but instead he’s been getting a series of shit assignments from his boss/wife Elisabeth. Mandelkern is beginning to wonder if there’s an underlying message to these assignments and then he’s told to interview the reclusive Dirk Svensson, the author of a wildly successful illustrated children’s book “The story of Leo and the Notmuch.” Mandelkern protests against the assignment, and with his marriage in crisis, he storms out of his apartment on the journey to interview Svensson.

Mandelkern’s assignment is simple: interview the author and go beyond the “brief bios and conjectures about Dirk Svensson.” As there are no in-depths interviews of Svensson, this is an important assignment. No one knows exactly where Svensson lives–somewhere North of Milan on Lago di Lugano, and Mandelkern isn’t in the best of tempers when he reaches his destination. He’s met by Svensson and his three-legged dog, Lua. They are joined by Svensson’s lover, Tuuli & her son.

Funeral for a Dog starts off simply enough with a series of seven postcards sent from Mandelkern to his wife, Elisabeth. These postcards contain just a few sentences, and the words break off only to be picked up by the next card. These cryptic messages give the idea that Mandelkern has undergone some sort of cathartic experience due to the assignment. Then the book opens with a window into Mandelkern’s problematic marriage. Elisabeth publicly addresses her husband by his last name, yet privately she insists that they have a child. An early episode in the book describes sex between the couple as “warlike,” and afterwards, Mandelkern packs and leaves.

What should be a simple assignment becomes increasingly complex. Staying with Svensson, Mandelkern discovers a secret manuscript called Astroland about Svensson’s past and a ménage-a trois. At this point, the narration divides between Svensson (through his manuscript) and Mandelkern. Some parts of the novel contain a symbolic quality–Mandelkern, for example, repeatedly mentions that he cannot wash off menstrual blood left from sex with his wife. Is this symbolic for the traces of Elisabeth he cannot erase?

Pletzinger has an unusual style that took this reader some getting used to. Chapters are short, and some are transcribed phone calls and interviews. Paragraphs are the sort of note taking and questions one would expect from a journalist on assignment:

“And this thought too is only pilfered. The room smells of damp stone, even though it isn’t raining (the roof is cracked). Again the thought of Elisabeth and the assignment she has given me, for a moment I’d like to call her, we have important things to talk about, but my telephone is in my suitcase at the Hotel Lido Seegarten. I’m drunk once again, too drunk for research, I can only speculate. I should put aside my pen, I could break open the suitcase, my questions remain:

–How do I find out who Felix Blaumeiser was?
–Why does Lua only have three legs?
–Tuuli says Svensson can’t paint—who painted those pictures?
–Who exactly is Kiki Kaufman?
–How do I open the suitcase?”

The book’s intricate plot is built on the themes of love, loss and relationships. Given the title, it’s not difficult to predict the death of the dog, Lua, but that’s just one loss; there are others, and part of the novel takes place in New York 9/11/01. The motif of Borroemean rings occurs in the novel which underscores the meta-meaning of the triangular relationship between Svensson, Tuuli and a third character, Felix. Funeral for a Dog is for those who like their novels teasingly-complex, non traditional and non linear.

Readers should be aware that some passages include details of cockfight and another section details the capitations of chickens.

(Translated by Ross Benjamin.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (March 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Thomas Pletzinger
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman

Bibliography:

• Funeral for a Dog (March 2011 in US)

“Colourful is only that what she can still remember, surrounded by darkness of which she is at the core, her head […] carries colourful memories, memories of somebody, who she was. Probably was. Who was she? Whose head was her head? Who owns the memories?””

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (MAY 2, 2011)

The “Girl,” who ponders these questions, is one of the protagonists in Jenny Erpenbeck’s innovative and powerful novel Visitation. Memories of innocent excitement and happiness of youth, of arriving, settling down, and then having to leave again and of families and people loved and lost form the core of the story. People and events are centred around a lake-side summer house surrounded by expansive woods and gardens in the region just east of Germany’s capital, Berlin, affording it the role as the central character and integrating force of the narrative. Using her zooming lens, the author condenses many decades of twentieth century German history into time-specific, intricate and intimate glimpses into the lives of twelve different residents and their families living on the property. While the owners build and add to the house, change it and its grounds over time, leaving visible marks and impressions, they are in turn impacted by the environment and the historical events occurring beyond it.

Starting out more like a fairy-tale, the novel gains intensity as it progresses: the portraits become more intense, reaching deeper into the background of the individuals, also relating their actions to specific historical time periods of the last decades: from the Weimar Republic, through the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, War and Soviet occupation, to Socialist East Germany and Fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. The Girl’s haunting account far away, having had to flee her home and Germany, stands out as one of the most heart-wrenching chapters. In others, the reader senses underlying tense emotions, despite the deceptively detached, often sparse language, that refers to most protagonists only as the Architect, the Writer, the Visitor, etc. or the Gardener. However, despite the apparent indistinctness, the individuals portrayed are engagingly realistic and anything but bland generalizations. Events beyond the calm of the summer house are alluded to, hints that may be easier to detect for the German reader. The narrator’s language and style changes slightly as the story moves from one voice to the next. Erpenbeck often uses rhythmic prose, sometimes staccato sentences, repetitions, or lyrical prose to reflect her protagonists’ moods and characteristics. While the different individuals pass through the house as transient residents – some return later, allowing for intergenerational connections – only the “Gardener,” more a symbol than a person, remains as a constant, his chapters alternating with the others.

The original title Heimsuchung has several meanings in German, one of which is “Visitation.” This has an ominous or threatening undertone and often refers to ghosts or disease. An additional meaning contained in the term is “searching for home.” Both connotations are beautifully captured in stories. For example, the Authoress looks back on a long life, that included fleeing the home of her youth all the way to Moscow and the Urals, and, even while “going home” now to the house and the lake, she is still searching for the “home” that she can emotionally return to. On the other hand, the overconfident Architect, a former Albert Speer collaborator, is on the run, the ghosts of the past having caught up with him: he is locking up, hiding the valuables, leaving the key for the next occupant of the house…

Award-winning Jenny Erpenbeck is a representative of the younger generation of German authors (born in 1967). Many like her were born and raised in then East Germany. Their background enables them to take a different perspective on the past. Inspired by and based on her family’s summer house, the author sensitively mixes her own memories and those of people she knew with the wide-ranging fictional reality of her novel. While recent novels like Simon Mawer‘s The Glass Room come to mind, in that comparable techniques were used to build the novels, Erpenbeck’s voice is fresh and independent and very convincing. Visitation, published in German in 2008 and now available in the highly praised translation by Susan Bernofksy, was recently chosen by author Nicole Krauss as one her favorite books of the year.

(Having read the novel in its original, all translations in this review are mine.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	New Directions; First Edition edition (September 30, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jenny Erpenbeck
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	The Vanishing of KatharinaLinden by Helen Grant Another house that inspires an historical story: Sea Glass by Anita Shreve

Bibliography:

• The Old Child & Other Stories (1999; 2005 in US)
• Cats Have Seven Lives (2000)
• Trinkets (2001)
• The Book of Words (2004; 2007 in US)
• Visitation (2004; September 2010 in US)
• Things that Disappear (2009)

“None of the patients ever ventured to reply to Helene’s question by asking how she was herself. Her uniform protected her. The white apron was a stronger signal than any of the traffic lights going up at more and more road junctions in the city these days, shining brightly to show who could go and who must stop. If you wore white you could keep your mouth shut; if you wore white you weren’t asked how you were. Courtesy was all on the outside for Helene and hardly tamed her despair, but it controlled it; pity for the suffering of others was her inner prop and stay.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (OCT 22, 2010)

In the original German version, so I’ve been told, the title of this book is Die Mittagsfrau, or “The Noonday Witch.” According to legend, the witch appears in the heat of day to spirit away children from their distracted parents. Those who are able to engage the witch in a short conversation find that her witch-like powers evaporate.

In Julia Franck’s brilliant English version (translated by the very talented Anthea Bell), Helene gradually retreats into silence and passivity, losing her ability to communicate effectively. We meet her in the book’s prologue as the mother of an eight-year-old boy, leading her son towards a packed train in the direction of Berlin. Before the train arrives she tells him a white lie, abandoning him at a bench, never to return. In the succeeding 400 pages, the reader gains a glimpse as to what drove Helene to this most unnatural act.

Helene is born into a family that defines the word “dysfunction.” Her charismatic, morphine-addicted older sister Martha engages her in an incestuous relationship. Her mentally unbalanced “foreign” (i.e., Jewish mother) is unable to connect with her two daughters, totally distancing from them when their father goes off to fight the Great War and becomes grievously injured. When the two sisters gain the chance to flee to Berlin, they grab it and train as nurses, exposing them to the pain of their patients and also giving them ready access to drugs.

Martha fits right into the debauchery and frantic partying of a decaying Berlin with her enlightened free-thinking friend and physician-lover, Leontine, but Helene is far more circumspect and sensitive. Her one enduring love is a philosophy student named Carl who also feels deeply and tells her, “The God principle is built on pain. Only if pain were obliterated from the world could we speak of the death of God.” When he is gone from the scene, she is unable to protect herself from victimization, occurring time and time again, with sexual predators and the cruel man she eventually marries.

As readers, we watch helplessly as Helene becomes increasingly detached, her heart becoming cold and numb. So it is no surprise when she concludes of her son, “…she had nothing more for him, her words were all used up long ago, she had neither bread nor an hour’s time for him, there was nothing of her left for the child.”

As the book progresses, the reader is forced to adapt an omnipotent stance; we know the consequence of some of the characters’ decisions and the genocide that will soon follow, but we are powerless to guide the characters through. Julia Franck instructs through omission as much as she does the details. When Helene calls Berlin to speak to Martha and gets no answer, we as readers are reasonably sure what has occurred. But it is never confirmed. As a result, as Helene goes numb, we begin to understand. And we begin to gain some compassion for an act that virtually all mothers would consider unforgiveable.

There is a menacing quality that pervades the book, becoming more and more pronounced as Hitler rises in power. There is no black-and-white morality or easy outcomes; there are simply all kinds of loss – loss of one’s sanity, loss of innocence, loss of love, loss of the natural order of things, loss of hope. The more the characters lose, the more they must abandon. In many ways, we know they are already as good as gone.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press (October 5, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Julia Franck
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Germans: The Good German by Joseph Kanon The Reader by Bernard Schlink

Partial Bibliography (translated works only):

• Blindness of the Heart (2007;  2010 in US)