Category: reading

This month I will focus mainly on a round-up of my reading, because I’ve already bored you to death with my life summary (going to England to bring Kasper back, unpacking, getting internet connection, cleaning, and building shelves and other necessities). I’ve also been to see One OK Rock twice, once in London and once in Berlin, and have attended a couple of classical concerts with Romanian musicians and singers (both on the same day). I’ve been to a couple of films, gone for a long walk around Wannsee and seen a Festival of Lights in Berlin. All in all, a busy and fun month, though tiring, and I’ve made the delightful discovery that in spite of its high ceilings, my flat is surrounded by other flats on all sides and therefore much warmer than my house in England.

It’s been a wild mix of books this month, books that I had on my Kindle (while travelling) and books that I happened to come across while unpacking, as well as two that I borrowed from the local library.

Hans Fallada: Altes Herz geht auf die Reise (Old Heart Goes on a Journey) – a lesser-known work by Fallada, probably written for a younger audience, as it has a lot of the naive but still quite subversive charm of Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives. It’s about an old professor who has retired from teaching and dreams of immersing himself in his biblical studies, but then gets called to the village where his goddaughter is living as an orphan in the care of a dodgy couple and much against his will becomes embroiled in an effort to rescue her. One for Fallada completists rather than a good introduction to his work, but it was amusing enough.

Petra Gabriel: Kaltfront (Berlin 1956) – one of the books in the long-running ‘Es geschah in Berlin 19XX’ (it happened in Berlin) series, crime novels set in the capital of Germany (or at least part-capital) over the course of the 20th century, starting from 1910. This one is of course full of the Cold War and features spies in a divided city that still hasn’t quite put up a physical wall. I can’t quite remember the story, to be honest, so it wasn’t strikingly original, but it’s a good portrait of the city at the time, and there are many different authors involved in the series, so it’s bound to vary in style and quality.

Jean Rhys: Good Morning, Midnight – couldn’t resist rereading this one, and not for the first time. This time I was in a very good mood, however, so it didn’t depress me as much as her writing usually does, much though I love her style. The loneliness of a woman past her prime, who doesn’t quite know how to get out of her poverty-stricken, sorry little routine, who fails at all the jobs and relationships she attempts. I just recently saw the shortish Korean film ‘Spring Night’ directed by Kang Mi-ja, which is about middle-aged people battling ill health, alcoholism, depression, and it reminded me of this, with its bleak outlook on the inability of humans to get out of the rut they find themselves in. I know some people find Rhys characters unbearably passive and want to shake them, but they inspire me with such pity and compassion for their fragility.

Frances Wood: Hand-Grenade Practice in Peking – a little gem I discovered thanks to Slightly Foxed. It’s the memoir of a British student who went to study in Peking in 1975, just before Mao’s death, and it’s written with a lot of charm and sympathy for the Chinese, but also poking fun at the comic absurdity of some of the situations and ideology they encountered at the time, while also being quite critical about the foreign students themselves (the British finding no better national song than Old Macdonald Had a Farm, the more-Maoist-than-thou attitudes of the students from New Zealand and Canada, the insensitive questioning from all of them). The author became a specialist librarian for the Chinese section of the British Library and she clearly does not want to be superficial and judgemental, and apologises if she is too trite about anyone who might have traumatic memories associated with the Cultural Revolution that was going on at the time – although not always visible to outsiders.

Then I coincidentally read a series of books about migrants – appropriate enough when I am a recent migrant myself to Germany, albeit in a far more privileged position.

Monique Ilboudo: So Distant from My Life, transl. Yarri Kamara – a young man from a fictional West African country is desperate to make a better life abroad, and is prepared to do almost anything to achieve that. After several failed attempts, he hooks up with an older Frenchman who wants to donate money to build classrooms in the countryside. In less than 150 pages, the author covers so much about the aftermaths of colonialism, the failure of well-meant aid efforts, the patronising attitude of the former colonizers but also the corruption of the new governments in African countries, plus of course the obsession with migration, the feeling that one cannot waste one’s whole life waiting for something to get better, and seek one’s fortune instead elsewhere.

My only desire then was to give myself a second chance. Leave. Go anywhere but here. Get far away from this life. Leave, live my dreams. Everybody has a right to do that. What wrong had I done then? Our common quest is to try and live a better life. I sought to live better, a place to live better. Just a small corner on this vast earth where I, too, could blossom. To deter me, my uncle spoke to me about roots. A line of argument I found absurd. Even plants are intelligent enough to grow around stones, seeking the best soil for their roots underground. My roots would grow wherever I found my happiness.

Li-Young Lee: The City in Which I Love You – a book of poetry by an Asian-American poet who revisits the traumas that made his family flee Indonesia. It focuses on his father in particular, as if seeking to understand and build a better relationship with that man. It’s not just about migration, it’s also about spirituality, human history, love, family. But it’s the beautiful imagery and world of possibilities that this poetry opens inside me that I really love. I have carried this book with me throughout the summer months and reread the poems and found new meanings each time:

Straight from my father’s wrath,

and long from my mother’s womb,

late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,

bearing the mark of one who’s experienced

neither heaven nor hell,

my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,

in league with stones of the earth, I

enter, without retreat or help from history,

the days of no day, my earth

of no earth, I re-enter

the city in which I love you.

And I never believed that the multitude

of dreams and many words were vain.

GauZ’: Standing Heavy, transl. Frank Wynne – what comes to mind reading this series of life stories skipping from the 1960s to the 1990s and then 2010s about immigrants from Cote D’Ivoire coming to Paris is ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’, although the political situations they encounter are all different at the outset. The three young men from the different time periods are also connected to each other by familial or social ties, and they all work at some point as security guards or other menial jobs where they can observe and wonder about the overconsumption and waste of the Western world. I loved the sharp satirical vignettes, although they felt more like an article or blog post rather than fitting in seamlessly into the novel.

At the RSCI [Residence for Students from Cote D’Ivoire], every rumour was half-false or half-true. And in an atmosphere of enforced idleness, they proliferated. Now that there were no security jobs, no one at the RSCI had work. So, rumours were rife. As in every ghetto in the world, the inhabitants of the RSCI rarely moved around… There were no walls, no jailer to physically imprison them. The cafes on the place d’Italie were a two-minute walk away, the trendy bars of the Butte-aux-Cailles only five minutes’… But for most human beings, a ghetto, whether rich or poor, narrows the horizon, it creates prison bars in the mind.

Daša Drndić: Canzone di Guerra, transl. Celia Hawkesworth – although this book describes many elements from the author’s own biography (moving to Canada with a young daughter to escape the war in Yugoslavia), this is a novel featuring a fictional main narrator Tea Radic, who is prickly and angry and quite critical of the Canadian government’s treatment of immigrants, by no means the ‘grateful, good immigrant’. Once again, this is quite a fragmentary sort of novel, moving back and forth in time, with extensive footnotes, as the narrator explores her compatriots past and present, before and after migration, as well as her own family history.

Here we sleep peacefully, there’s no shelling, but we’re waging a different war. A war in the soul, a war in the head. Why did we come? We thought Canada was a country of great possibilities. I don’t know why no one told us the truth.

Shukri Mabkhout: The Italian, transl. Miled Faiza & Karen McNeill – this book only tangentially touches upon migration (the brother of one of the main protagonists has established himself in France), but is still very much preoccupied with politics in the home country, in this case, Tunisia. Abdel Nasser is an idealistic student who meets the charismatic, highly intelligent and politically engaged Zeina – they fall in love but marry more out of necessity (to facilitate their careers) rather than conviction, and we see the gradual disintegration not only of their marriage but also of their dreams and convictions. What’s interesting is that although this book won the International Prize for Arabic Literature in 2015, most of the Arabic reviewers on Goodreads rate it very low, a one or two star read. I wonder if this is politically motivated, or if they take exception to the rather bland style, which is more like a Western novel written by a millenial author, rather than enchanting us with poetic language or imagery.

Brandon Taylor: The Late Americans – this is perhaps the very kind of novel that I had in mind in the previous sentence (Western novel written by a millennial author). A group portrait of grad students in Iowa and their assorted friends or acquaintances of all social backgrounds, it’s a tangle of relationships, resentments, mostly gay sex, aspirations quickly tempered by reality and the need to earn a living. The cast of characters is large but the ones I found most interesting were quickly abandoned in favour of others that were rather annoying, and I found it hard to muster interest in their often self-inflicted woes, especially when the style was nothing to get excited about. For a far more moving and beautiful description of learning to love and live as a gay person, see Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park.

Nora Iuga: Hipodrom – another novel smashed into fragments, moving between timelines, but no one can accuse Romanian author Nora Iuga (better known as a poet and translator of German literature into Romanian) of being bland. She is boldly experimental in this somewhat autobiographical novel of her childhood, then returning to teach and finally growing old and reminiscing about her beloved home city of Sibiu. There are some startlingly candid passages (such as her physical attraction to some of her male pupils or a sexual assault she experienced without quite being aware it was one), as well as the recurring image of a white horse that she would like to gallop away on (which seems to be sexual imagery at times, but could also represent freedom or death at others). This sounds very much like Iuga’s swan song (she is 94 years old) and she is trying to fit everything in and leave nothing unsaid. Understandable, but not what quite I expected from her, knowing her other work.

One book that has been occupying a lot of my reading time, but which I’ll probably take 2 or more months to finish is the biography of Kafka by Reiner Stach – or at least the third and final volume of it, The Years of Insight. Really fascinating and detailed research into Kafka’s work, family, friendships and relationships with women, as well as his attitude towards war, Zionism, the fall of the Austrian Empire and so on.

I have now built part of my bookshelves and have been able to unpack some of my books (roughly half, I estimate), so I’ll be able to participate in German Literature Month, Non-Fiction November and even Novella in November reading challenges, although my choices might be more haphazard rather than strategic.