Category Archives: Novella

November 30, 2015 · 11:51 am

Review: August by Christa Wolf

I received a review copy of this title from Seagull Books.  This book was originally published in German and this edition has been translated by Katy Derbyshire.  This is my final contribution to German Literature Month.  This has been a fantastic event with over 130 titles reviewed by bloggers.

My Review:
Layout 1The author, Christa Wolf, wrote this 74 page book in a single sitting as an anniversary gift to her husband.  It is a beautiful, heartwarming story that shows us that even in the most extreme and unfortunate circumstances love and kindness can make everything tolerable.  August and his mother were forced from their home in East Prussia at the end of World War II and as these refugees were traveling by train to escape the atrocities of war, an accident takes August’s mother.  As an orphan August is placed in a hospital, which is actually a former castle turned into a hospital that treats tubercular and consumptive patients.

August is surrounded by sickness and death and sorrow but what he remembers most about his time at the hospital is an older girl named Lilo.  Lilo is a teenager, so she is a bit older than August, but her warmth and kindness are something that August constantly wants to be around.  Her songs and stories make him forget, at least for a little while, that he is an orphan living in a hospital.  No matter how sick or close to death another patient might be, Lilo still visits and tenderly cares for many of the children at the hospital.

August is now a sixty-year-old man looking back on his life and remembering his time in the hospital after the war.  It is a testament to the resilency of the human spirit that August doesn’t remember all of the death and destruction around him, but what stands out in his mind is the compassion and generosity of Lilo.  August has lived a full and happy life and he is able to look back on it with a warm feeling in his heart and no regrets.  August is also very thankful for the wonderful life he has shared with his wife and for his job of driving tourists back and forth from Prague to Dresden.  He is a simple man and is so grateful for what might seem to many as insignificant memories.

Written in beautiful, concise prose, Wolf is the perfect example of the fact that even a very short novella can have a powerful and far reaching impact on readers.

About the Author:
C WolfA citizen of East Germany and a committed socialist, Mrs. Wolf managed to keep a critical distance from the communist regime. Her best-known novels included “Der geteilte Himmel” (“Divided Heaven,” 1963), addressing the divisions of Germany, and “Kassandra” (“Cassandra,” 1983), which depicted the Trojan War.

She won awards in East Germany and West Germany for her work, including the Thomas Mann Prize in 2010. The jury praised her life’s work for “critically questioning the hopes and errors of her time, and portraying them with deep moral seriousness and narrative power.”

Christa Ihlenfeld was born March 18, 1929, in Landsberg an der Warthe, a part of Germany that is now in Poland. She moved to East Germany in 1945 and joined the Socialist Unity Party in 1949. She studied German literature in Jena and Leipzig and became a publisher and editor.

In 1951, she married Gerhard Wolf, an essayist. They had two children.

 

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November 17, 2015 · 12:00 am

Review: War, So Much War by Mercè Rodoreda

I received an ARC from Open Letter Press through Edelweiss.  This English edition has been translated by Martha Tennent

My Review:
War So Much WarAdrià Guinart lives in Barcelona with his mother and adopted younger sister.  But at the first chance he gets he leaves his home and joins an unnamed war that is ravaging the countryside.  He is only fifteen-years-old and what he sees while the war is raging forms the bulk of this bizarre and surreal narrative.  The book almost reads like a series of shorts stories, each of which is based on a different character that Adria meets while he is away from home at war.

There is very little fighting or war that Adria actually sees while he is roaming the countryside.  He stumbles upon the after affects of the war by meeting some wretched people along the way.  He meets a woman named Eva who is a miller’s daughter.  The book reads like a fantasy and sometimes the story is very disjointed and his episode with a woman named Eva is a perfect example.  As he is wading in a river with her for a while he learns that she is a miller’s daughter.  Their time together is very brief and when he parts from her he makes his way to the mill that her father owns.  At the mill he is tied up and beaten by the miller and eventually escapes.  He later meets up with Eva again, which second encounter seems even more random than the first.  They have a brief conversation and she leaves him again.

Another strange episode that Adria experiences takes place at a farmhouse that he stumbles upon in the woods.  When he first sees the owner of the house he is mercilessly beating his dog who has stolen a morsel of food.  The farmer explains that there is nothing in this world that he despises more than a thief and so he unleashes his anger on the family pet.  Adria stays with the farmer and his family for about two weeks doing chores for them in exchange for food and shelter.  One night the farmer’s daughters take Adria to a hidden pantry where Adria steals a ham.  When the farmer finds the ham, Adria suffers the same type of vicious beating that the dog received.  At this point he is forced to leave the farmhouse and once again roam the countryside.

The randomness and lack of smooth transitions from one scene to the next give the book a dreamlike quality.  It’s as if we have a front row seat to a viewing of Adria’s never ending nightmare.  Adria comes upon a castle whose owner has been tied up and held hostage in his own home.  He then wanders off once again and finds a girl on a beach who pledges her undying loyalty to him.  When he rejects her, she walks into the sea and commits suicide.  While walking along the sea Adria encounters a beach house where the owner welcomes him and feeds him.  He ends up staying with the man who owns the beach house, Senyor Ardevol,  for weeks and when the man dies he leaves his home and his possessions to Adria.

For the second part of the book Adria meets a series of interesting characters on the road whose stories are told in greater length.  Adria starts with Ardevol’s story and how he came to live in the beach house and how he came to see the strange image in the mirror in his foyer.  Adria also meets a cat man, a hermit and a man with a never-ending appetite, all of whom have strange tales to tell.  Even with the shift of focus in the book from Adria himself to the people he meets on the road, the stories in the second part of the book are just as fantastical and surreal as Adria’s experiences in the first part.

I have mixed feelings about this book but I think that is due to my preference for more realistic fiction.  The overall idea of the book is interesting but some of the shorter encounters of the main character, especially in the first half of the book, did not keep my attention.  Has anyone else read any other books by Mercè Rodoreda?  I am wondering if they are similar to this title.

 

About the Author:
Merce RMercè Rodoreda i Gurguí was a Spanish / Catalan novelist.

She is considered by many to be the most important Catalan novelist of the postwar period. Her novel “La plaça del diamant” (‘The diamond square’, translated as ‘The Time of the Doves’, 1962) has become the most acclaimed Catalan novel of all time and since the year it was published for the first time, it has been translated into over 20 languages. It’s also considered by many to be best novel dealing with the Spanish Civil War.

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November 2, 2015 · 1:07 pm

Review: Nagasaki by Éric Faye

I received an advanced review copy of this title from Gallic Books through NetGalley. This book was originally published in French and this English translation is done by Emily Boyce.  This is also my first post for Novella November hosted by Poppy Peacock Pens.  Please visit her site for more great reviews of novellas throughout the month.

My Review:
NagasakiShimura Kobo leads a very quiet and regimented life in the suburbs of Nagasaki.  He is a meteorologist who avoids the company of his coworkers and every night returns to his neat, orderly and lonely apartment.  When food starts to disappear from his refrigerator and items appear out of place in his apartment he takes notice and is really bothered by this disruption in his organized life.  At first he thinks that he is just going crazy but in order to verify his missing items he starts cataloguing the contents of his refrigerator and measuring the liquid in his juice containers.  He finally decides to buy a webcam which is linked to his laptop so he can spy on his visitor while he is at work.

Shimura eagerly watches his laptop at work waiting for the intruder to appear on his screen.  He has to wait several days but he finally glimpses a woman standing in his kitchen, enjoying the sunlight and making herself a cup of tea.  He immediately calls the police who go over to his apartment to catch the suspected intruder.  But when the police arrive, there are no signs of a break in.  The doors and windows are locked and the police are about to give up their search when they discover a woman hiding in the closet in Shimura’s spare bedroom.

The woman, as it turns out, had lost her job in the economic recession and had to give up her apartment.  She was living on the streets of Nagasaki until one day she noticed Shimura leave for work.  She also noticed that he left the door to his house unlocked and so she let herself in, just intending to have a warm and dry place to stay for a few hours.  But when she discovers Shimura’s extra bedroom which is rarely used, she basically lives with him unnoticed for the better part of a year.

The most fascinating part of the story is the lasting psychological impacts that their inadvertent cohabitation has on both of them.  Shimura is forced to contemplate his lonely and solitary existence and he never feels comfortable again living in his apartment.   The woman does a short stint in jail and writes Shimura a very detailed letter about why she chose his house to stay in.  But she too is changed from her sojourn at Shimura’s home.  Their individual isolation and loneliness is cast into sharp relief when they each see how the other one lives.

This is a quick yet powerful read that I highly recommend. My only complaint is that I didn’t want the book to end; I wanted to know more about the fate of Shimura and his secret roommate.   This is a fantastic choice to kick off Novella November!

About The Author:
Eric FayeBorn in Limoges, Éric Faye is a journalist and the prize-winning author of more than twenty books, including novels and travel memoirs. He was awarded the Académie Française Grand Prix du Roman in 2010 for Nagasaki.

 

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September 21, 2015 · 1:43 pm

Review: The Looking Glass Sisters by Gøhril Gabrielsen

I received an advanced review copy of this novella from Peirene Press.  This is the third book in their Chance Encounter Series.  This title was originally written and published in Norwegian and this English translation has been done by John Irons.

My Review:
Looking Glass SistersThis is an emotionally intense and sinister book that will leave you thinking about relationships with close family members long after you finish the last page.  The focus of the book is on the codependence of two sisters who are each other’s only remaining relatives after their parents die.  When the book opens they are middle-aged and have been living together in isolation on the outskirts of rural Norway for almost 30 years.

The first sister, the one who is the unnamed narrator of the story, has been physically handicapped since she was a little girl.  She contracted a high fever which caused her to be in the hospital for several weeks and the illness left her paralyzed from the waist down.  She must rely on her parents for all of her needs and when her parents die the only other person she has left in her life is her older sister, Ragna.  The sisters live in a remote house that no one ever visits and the only way to reach the local village for supplies is by snow sled.

But one day the routine of the sisters’ lives changes when a man named Johan moves into the area and starts to court Ragna.  We get the sense that Ragna has been resentfully taking care of her sister for years and has never really developed any life of her own because of the constant needs of  her invalid sister.  Ragna seems bitter and at times she is emotionally and physically cruel to her disabled sister.  There is one scene in the book that is particularly painful to read;  the handicapped sister has to use the bathroom and drags herself out of bed with her crutches and just before she reaches the bathroom, Ragna runs in and locks the door.  Ragna refuses to come out of the bathroom and the crippled and helpless sister is forced to relieve herself in her pants.  Her dignity is further eroded when she then must be cleaned up and carried back to bed by Ragna.

When Johan comes along and decides to marry Ragna, it seems that Ragna could not be happier now that she has the opportunity to rid herself of the burden of her sister.  At times I felt sorry for both sisters.  On the one hand, the handicapped sister cannot help her situation and she has no choice but to be constantly asking her sister for everything she needs.  On the other hand, Ragna must constantly be at her sister’s beck and call and Ragna feels that her sister is never grateful for what Ragna does for her.  We also get the feeling throughout the narrative that the disabled sister has a very narrow view of the world and doesn’t understand what is going on outside her room or how her constant demands affect her sister.  At times she appears paranoid and melodramatic.

This novella brings up some interesting thoughts about family members and our obligations to them.  If we are the only ones left to take care of a loved one are we obligated to do so to the detriment of our own lives?   But if we can’t rely on our family, then who else is there to depend on in times of need?  In the end, Ragna and Johan make a selfish decision in favor of making peace and quiet for themselves.

The novellas published by Peirene are meant to be read quickly, in a matter of a few hours.  But I found this book so dark and intense that I could only read it a few pages at a time over the course of several days.  The final book in the Chance Encounter series is a stunner that is the perfect way to finish out this set of novellas.

About The Author:
G GabrielsenGøhril Gabrielsen, born in 1961, grew up in Finnmark, the northernmost county in Norway, and currently lives in Oslo. She won Aschehoug’s First Book Award for her 2006 novel Unevnelige hendelser (Unspeakable Events), and was the recipient of the 2010 Tanum Scholarship for Women. Since the publication of her debut novel she has brought out two further books to great acclaim in her native Norway, Svimlende muligheter, ingen frykt (The Looking-Glass Sisters) and Skadedyr (Vermin). Her fourth novel is due out in 2015.

 

 

 

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August 31, 2015 · 12:00 am

Review: Confusion by Stefan Zweig

I have not been very active on the blog this week, but I have a great excuse.  Classes have started again so that means I am back in the classroom.  I have a record number of students who have signed up for Latin this year.  So when someone makes the comment that Latin is a “dead language” I reference my robust numbers of enthusiastic students.  Confusion is the perfect book to review for back-to-school since it highlights a rather unusual relationship between a student and teacher.  This book was originally published in the German in 1929 and this English translation is done by Anthea Bell.

My Review:
ConfusionWhen the novella opens, Roland is celebrating his sixtieth birthday and his thirtieth anniversary of teaching in the Department of Languages and Literature.  His colleagues and students have presented him with a book that is a complete biography of his academic career.  The only thing missing is an account of how he was inspired to begin his career in academics.  The rest of the story is an account of Roland’s youth and his experience with the teacher that inspired his career.

Roland first attends university in Berlin where he is bored and uninspired and as a result he does not take his studies seriously.  He spends months lounging around in coffee-houses and sleeping with many women and not tending to his studies at all.  One day his father shows up unannounced and this incident makes for a very funny and awkward scene in the book.  Roland is so embarrassed by his behavior that he agrees to leave Berlin and attend university in a small provincial town in central Germany.  This is where he encounters the teacher that will change his life and infuse in him a lifelong passion for literature.

When he first arrives at his new university, Roland stumbles into a lecture on Shakespeare which is being given by a passionate and well-spoken professor.  All of the students listening are captivated by this teacher and Roland is instantly inspired as well.  He finds the professor and enlists his help in mapping out a plan for his academic future.  Roland lives in the same building as the teacher and his wife so he quickly becomes very close with the couple.  Roland eats meals with the couple, spends evenings in the teacher’s study, and even goes on various social outings separately with the wife.

From the beginning it becomes clear that the teacher and his wife have a very strange marriage.  They never display an affection for each other and seem to be more roommates than husband and wife.  As Roland spends time with the wife, she drops hints here and there that they are not happily married and that the teacher is rather a difficult person to live with.  But the true details about the non-traditional relationship between husband and wife are not revealed until the very end of the book.

Throughout his time with the teacher, Roland is plagued by the constant mood swings of his mentor.  Sometimes his teacher is encouraging and kind and then all of a sudden he is insulting, distant and cold.  Roland works hard at his studies to impress his teacher, even to the detriment of his mental and physical health.  Roland feels like he is walking on eggshells because he never knows if his teacher will be kind or cruel.  The teacher’s feelings and reasons for his changeable behavior are not revealed until the end of the book.

As a teacher this book was interesting to read because it reminded me that we oftentimes never know what kind of an impact we can have on students’ lives and careers.  Roland has this one man to thank for his long and successful career but he never gets to tell the teacher about his inspiration.  It is significant that the teacher is never given a name; he remains a nameless entity even though he has such an amazing impact on Roland’s fate.   Furthermore, there could not be a more apt title for this book than the word “confusion.”  Roland is confused about his relationship to his teacher, and he is also confused about the relationship between the teacher and his wife.  And until the very end, the reader is confused about what, exactly, is going on with the teacher.

This is a touching, powerful and short read that I highly recommend.  I look forward to reading more of Zweig’s works.  Thanks to the New York Review of Books for reviving another fantastic classic work in translation.

About The Author:
Stefan Zweig was one of the world’s most famous writers during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the U.S., South America and Europe. He produced novels, plays, biographies and journalist pieces. Among his most famous works are Beware of Pity, Letter from and Unknown Woman and Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles. He and his second wife committed suicide in 1942.

Zweig studied in Austria, France, and Germany before settling in Salzburg in 1913. In 1934, driven into exile by the Nazis, he emigrated to England and then, in 1940, to Brazil by way of New York. Finding only growing loneliness and disillusionment in their new surroundings, he and his second wife committed suicide.

Zweig’s interest in psychology and the teachings of Sigmund Freud led to his most characteristic work, the subtle portrayal of character. Zweig’s essays include studies of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Drei Meister, 1920; Three Masters) and of Friedrich Hlderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche (Der Kampf mit dem Dmon, 1925; Master Builders). He achieved popularity with Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928; The Tide of Fortune), five historical portraits in miniature. He wrote full-scale, intuitive rather than objective, biographies of the French statesman Joseph Fouché (1929), Mary Stuart (1935), and others. His stories include those in Verwirrung der Gefhle (1925; Conflicts). He also wrote a psychological novel, Ungeduld des Herzens (1938; Beware of Pity), and translated works of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and mile Verhaeren.

Most recently, his works provided inspiration for the 2014 film ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’

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