Austrian literature – findingtimetowrite

Best Books of My Reading Year 2024 – Oct to Dec

The last three months of the year were the most sociable of all: I either had guests or went out with friends every single week. We also had a book launch for Teresa Solana’s novel Black Storms, translated from Catalan and set in Barcelona, and went to Newcastle Noir with Teresa and her translator/husband Peter Bush.

I don’t know if it’s the recency effect on my reading memory, or if I get more picky about my reading towards the end of the year, but I seem to have read quite a few memorable books in the last part of this year. A couple of the books provoked a visceral reaction, reminding me of my own past, and this bittersweet nostalgia with a shot of trauma (but mostly affectionate remembrance) marked these last few months, especially once I unearthed a box full of old letters and diaries while clearing out the loft. I would therefore argue that perhaps the books I branded ‘most memorable’ for this part of the year were the ones that left me most emotionally drained.

After Han Kang won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I wanted to read more than The Vegetarian by her, and am so glad I did so, as I really liked Greek Lessons, while Human Acts bowled me over. I read another Korean book about student protests, I’ll Be Right There by Kyung Sook Shin, which was perhaps less dramatic and lyrical, but felt like a more personal story.

German Literature Month in November was a great opportunity to catch up with two of my Austrian favourites, Odon von Horvath and Marlen Haushofer . Further books in translation included the fierce, profoundly uncomfortable Japanese novella Cannibals and the very creative use of fake memoir format of Taiwan Travelogue. The wistfulness of Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow might seem the polar opposite of the boisterous middle-aged wife of Empar Moliner’s Beloved but I loved them both, while the gay love story set against a historical backdrop in The Betrayal of Thomas True appealed to my more sentimental side.

Aside from reading, I got to discover the Bertha Dochouse cinema at Curzon Bloomsbury dedicated to feature-length documentaries from around the world and saw a film about the women divers of Jeju Island in South Korea as well as the Black Box Diaries, about a notorious (and still very rare) case of a young woman journalist in Japan suing a TV boss for sexual assault. I continued watching and rewatching Wong Kar Wai films, finally got to see Happy Together, which is usually harder to find. It also proved to be a very good period for Asian TV series, with the ones that particularly stood out for me including the fun, irreverent historical drama Mr Queen, the Korean-Japanese co-production What Comes After Love, the Japanese tearjerker that went beyond the obvious resolutions in Beyond Goodbye, the energetic yet poignant depiction of Love in the Big City and, above all, Mr Plankton, which, despite its rather silly title, has scenes that I keep rewatching.

This may well be my last post for the year (although if I have time, I will also do a December wrap-up), so this might be a good time to reflect on the kind of reading year I’ve had. As you can see from my four seasonal summaries, much of the best reading this year came from other countries and languages. (Incidentally, so did most of my film viewing.) I suspect this is partly because I already have a foot out the door as I prepare to leave the UK. Back in the late 1980s and 1993/94, when I was pining for Britain, I was reading mostly English books and those were by far the most meaningful ones for me at that time. This may well be the case again once I settle in Berlin and start missing all the best things about Britain.

Another obvious pattern in my reading is my preference for fiction, particularly novels and novellas. Only a couple of non-fiction books made the cut for the best books of the year, although I read many more memoirs than in previous years. However, my Goodreads list usually does not reflect any of the plays or poetry that I might have read during the year. So maybe I should make a more deliberate choice in reviewing and promoting such works.

Finally, I should say that this year I set myself only an eminently achievable target of 100 books (I usually read around 150 per year). I did go over this target, but there have been a few months when I read far fewer books than ever previously (or at least since records began). The price to pay for extensive socialising and also binge-watching TV series.

For next year, I will maintain January in Japan but probably will start packing away my library and only keep the books on my trolley to hand, so there might be an odd collection of books being read and reviewed in the coming two or three months.

#GermanLitMonth: Marlen Haushofer forever!

Yes, I know I’ve written about Marlen Haushofer before and I know that not much of her work is available in English, but I’ll never stop writing about her since I first discovered her via her best-known (and translated) novel The Wall. She has become not just one of my favourite writers, but also the one I’d most like to translate from the German-speaking world, and I’m pleased to say that the work I wanted to translate most, the novella We Kill Stella, will be published in the translation of the wonderful Shaun Whiteside in 2025 by New Directions. I also really rate (and have reviewed) two other short novels Die Mansarde and Die Tapetentür, but even her children’s literature and her short stories are exceptional. I’ve translated two of her short stories and need to be more proactive about sending them to literary magazines after a couple of rejections.

But today I’d like to talk about her very first novel, which is in many respects autobiographical. In fact, the author of the Haushofer biography relied quite a bit on passages from this book to describe her childhood, and is an excellent companion piece to Himmel, der nirgendwo endet.

Marlen Haushofer: Eine Handvoll Leben (A Handful/Fistful of Life), 1955

This book has the same premise as Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, i.e. a mysterious, wealthy stranger shows up in town and invests in failing businesses for somewhat opaque reasons. It can’t have been influenced by the play, however, because the premiere took place in 1956. The play is also much more sinister, and focuses on revenge.

In the case of Haushofer’s novel, it’s not so much revenge as reminiscing. Mrs Betty Russel comes from abroad and shows interest in purchasing the family home of small-town entrepreneur Anton Pfluger, who died in a car crash. She is invited to stay overnight by Pfluger’s family and she starts rummaging through drawers and finds postcards and pictures neatly arranged in chronological order. This is when we discover that Betty is actually Elisabeth, who grew up in the area and was in fact Anton’s first wife and the mother of his son, now grown up.

We see Elisabeth as a child (known then as Lieserl) roaming around the countryside, then see her struggling to adapt to convent school, follow her first passionate yet conflicted love for a girl, then her marriage, and then a love affair which shakes her to the core, wakes her up from her unquestioning bourgeois existence and makes her run away. The chronology provides some structure for what is in essence a kaleidoscope of experiences, sensations and thoughts, some fleeting, some deeper. The author describes her own process in this passage:

Everything she’d gathered throughout her life was meaningless, a mosaic of tiny life-particles, shimmering in all colours, with great swathes of grey and black, but a meaningless mosaic nevertheless. Maybe an eye from very far away might have been able to discern some kind of pattern or message from this mountain of fragments, but that was no comfort, since she could not figure out the pattern herself, and she never would.

They say some writers already show signs of all of their future topics in their very first novel, and that is certainly true of Marlen Haushofer: we have here the close observation and unsentimental yet loving descriptions of nature that we see later in The Wall, the sophisticated understanding of the complexities of love, desire and marital life, the feeling of suffocation when living up to societal expectations, and ways in which to run away or retreat from those very expectations and demands.

The following passage (in my rough and ready translation) describes, I think, many of her female characters, living on the fence, half-frozen, yearning for something yet not daring to act. Just before the quote, there is an instance when her lover, Lenart, lays his arm around her in broad daylight – a gesture that she really doesn’t expect, as they never had a close relationship other than in bed.

The feeling of triumph quickened her breath momentarily, but the feeling ebbed quickly: the thought that Lenart might start loving her was claustrophobic and frightening. All of a sudden, she realised that she had never really wanted to be loved. She herself could only love what was difficult and unattainable, the thing that always withdrew from her. There was nothing more disappointing than to reach a goal, to fulfil a longing, and then be left with nothing to yearn for.

While this is not as accomplished as her later work, it is still an extraordinary novel in its candid depiction of a woman’s sensuality and defying of all social conventions. Marlen Haushofer always rejected being labelled a ‘feminist’, but I can imagine few other people writing like that about women’s innermost thoughts and desires in the early 1950s, even Shirley Jackson and Doris Lessing got there a little bit later than that.

Best of the Year: Translated Fiction

I hope you spent a lovely Christmas day if you celebrate it, or at least a restful one if you have no reason to celebrate. I have emerged from my Kasper-chasing, reading and film-watching haze to prepare the final instalment in my Best of the Year (although I will probably do a December wrap-up on the 29th or so). This last part has been my favourite kind of reading this year, namely literature in translation.

I admit this does not show a lot of variety: only five languages, of which four are Romance languages. Usually Japanese is there in the mix, but this year none of the ones I read from that country were truly memorable. With my London Reads the World Book Club, I have gone further afield and read books from other continents, but the twelve below remain my favourites, although I very nearly added the Vietnamese classic saga The Song of Kieu (but that would have made it a list of 13 books, which is a bit ominous).

I should admit right away that they were by far more memorable than most of the English-language books that I’ve read this year (certainly of the contemporary releases, I’m not counting rereads or reissues) – which is reflected in the fact that I’ve reviewed nearly all of them. Maybe foreign books need to jump through more hoops to get translated and published here, so that acts as an additional quality control?

This is not quite true, of course, because I read some of them in the original and can only hope and wish for them to get translated, while others were translated a long time ago but have fallen out of print. And of course quite a few of them are classics by now, so that would explain why they are more memorable.

Some of them were translated relatively quickly after their original language publication (Time Shelter, The Delivery, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur), while others had to wait for a long time (Forbidden Notebook) or are still waiting (the Romanian language books, needless to say – we know how ‘well’ those sell, alas!). The Machado de Assis stories have been translated several times, which is not uncommon for 19th century authors, although perhaps it’s unusual for the translations to be within just a couple of years of each other.

Georgi Gospodinov: Time Shelter, transl. Angela Rodel, Liveright (2022) and Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2023) (originally published in 2020)

Machado de Assis: The Looking Glass (Essential Stories), transl. Daniel Hahn, Pushkin Press, 2022 (originally published in the 19th century, other translations are available)

Violette Leduc: La femme au petit renard (The Lady and the Little Fox Fur), Gallimard, 1965.

Romain Gary: Adieu Gary Cooper, Gallimard, 1964.

Adolfo Bioy Casares: The Invention of Morel, transl. Ruth Simms, NYRB, 2003 (originally published in 1940)

Annie Ernaux: La Femme gelée (The Frozen Woman), Gallimard, 1981.

Alba de Céspedes: Forbidden Notebook, transl. Ann Goldstein, Astra House, 2023 (originally published 1952)

Claudia Piñeiro: A Little Luck, transl. Frances Riddle, Charco Press, 2023 (originally published in 2015)

Javier Marias: All Souls, transl. Margaret Jull Costa, Harvill Press, 1996 (originally published in 1989)

Margarita Garcia Robayo: The Delivery, transl. Megan McDowell, Charco Press, 2023 (originally published 2022)

Tatiana Țîbuleac: Vara în care mama a avut ochii verzi (The Summer When Mum Had Green Eyes), Cartier, 2017

Ernst Lothar: Der Engel mit der Posaune (The Angel with the Trumpet), Zsolnay Verlag, 1946.

Alina Nelega: Un nor în formă de cămilă (Cloud in Shape Like a Camel), Polirom 2021

There are too many covers here to prepare a poster (plus I want to spend some time with my family), so instead I have just included some of my favourites.

#GermanLitMonth: An Austrian Family Saga

Ernst Lothar: Der Engel mit der Posaune (The Angel with the Trumpet).

It’s hard to pin down a publication date for this book: it first appeared in English in 1944, when the outcome of the war was still uncertain and the author was in exile in the States. I haven’t got any further information about who translated it into English, because Lothar certainly wrote it in German. In 1946 it was published in German, but still in the States. A rather popular film adaptation was made in 1948 in Austria with an all-Austrian cast, and was remade in 1950 in Britain, reusing many of the Austrian film scenes, with dubbing, to keep down costs. It was only in 1963 that the novel was finally published by Austrian publisher Paul Zsolnay Verlag (who, as a Jewish publisher, experienced many of the same restrictions as those portrayed in the book and had to go into exile during the war). In more recent times, it has been reissued in English by Europa Editions as The Vienna Melody.

I should point out that the film adaptations insist more upon the love stories, especially those of the mother, while the book is much more concerned with painting a fresco of Viennese society from the 1880s to 1939, and with trying to capture the elusive Austrian soul, which the author would have you believe is much more inclusive and generous than the German one… if only they would be more self-aware. The book was born partly out of nostalgia for the fatherland while the author was in exile (a fatherland that did not treat him kindly because he was of Jewish descent, although he had been fully integrated into Austrian society and was initially a public prosecutor and then a theatre critic and highly-regarded theatre director). But it was undoubtedly also intended as a piece of propaganda to distinguish the Austrians from the Germans after the Second World War and ensure that posterity would view them more kindly. It worked, although of course not exclusively due to Lothar’s book, and the Austrian neutrality act in 1955 is proof of that.

This is a family saga centred around a fictional house on the corner of the very real streets of Seilerstätte and Annagasse in the centre of Vienna. It is one of those impressive multistorey bourgeois townhouses that abound in Vienna (and are now divided into flats or made into offices) and was built by the Alt family patriarch, piano-maker to the Imperial household, with the condition that all of his descendants should share it and live together. They do so over the next sixty years, although not always harmoniously, each family on a different floor.

There is unfortunately no Angel with a Trumpet (strictly speaking: a bassoon) above the doorway of this house, but this is the kind of house the author must have had in mind. From Wikipedia.

The main focus is initially on Franz Alt, a rather dreamy, dead-average bachelor who has to take over the family business, and who marries the high-spirited Henriette, the daughter of a Jewish university professor. Henriette struggles to fit into the family, she has always aspired for something more than the conventional bourgeois life. She was in love with the Crown Prince Rudolf and his suicide at Mayerling shatters her (the author hints that she was Rudolf’s great love also, and that he had asked her to commit a double suicide with him before finding a younger, more pliant victim).

Within the next generation, the focus is on Hans, Henriette’s first-born and much-loved son, who initially dreams of being a painter (and is turned down for Art School on the same occasion as Adolf Hitler), and has far more left-wing views, which makes him reluctant to work in the family business and occasionally gets him into trouble with his family and the police. He is wounded and then a POW in the First World War and it takes many years to secure his release.

Many Goodreads reviews complain that there is too much Austrian history and analysis of the Viennese psyche in the book, but that is precisely what I found interesting. Otherwise, this tale of love, hate, secrets, rivalry, betrayal, duels, possible bastards, family quarrels would have been little more than a soap opera. It has been described as the Austrian Forsyte Saga, but it reminded me more of Banffy’s Transylvanian trilogy – another sociopolitical novel disguised as a family saga, giving us a glimpse of a vanished world and trying to show who was responsible for losing that world, and how people can move forward.

Fascinated as I am by Vienna and its people, I found some of Lothar’s observations (often conveyed through his characters) remarkably astute. He can also be very funny, showing a sly, indirect wit and irony that is very Viennese.

Most fathers in Vienna had married late (after they’d sown their wild oats, as Uncle Drauffer used to say) and moved later into important positions. If you looked at it more closely, Vienna was actually a society for old people. Forty years old? Too young for anything. To be a minister, a general, a court adviser, to be allowed to join in the discussion, you had to be at least sixty. If you were young? Fatal mistake. Maybe because the Emperor was so old, that he wished to surround himself only with old people. Ebeseder claimed that the Crown Prince shot himself, because he could no longer bear to be with his father, who either couldn’t or wouldn’t understand what it meant to be young.
my own translation

There is also a remarkable passage in the book about Austrian Imperialism spoken by Fritz, one of Hans’ cousins. The Austrians were perhaps the only ones whose entire empire was contained within Europe rather than on other continents, yet they were just as much of a colonialist as the other big empires. Yet they lulled themselves with the illusion that all those small nations contained within the Austro-Hungarian Empire felt ‘Austrian’.

If an Austrian speaks German like you and I, then he thinks he is THE Austrian, and believes that any Czech or Italian or Pole feels just like he does about the Imperial capital, the Wurstelprater, the waltz and the Heurigen and the golden Viennese heart and all that twaddle… nonsense!… all they think about is: how on earth can I get out of this cursed prison, where my own language is not one of the official ones, but a sixth class native dialect, where I am constantly reminded that I am a third-class citizen, and yet it is considered natural that I should do a three year military service and pay taxes all my life for the welfare of the first-class citizens, the actual Viennese… I’d love nothing more than to be a real Austrian. When I arrive in Berlin on a train on the dot and feel the German thoroughness as soon as I alight at the Anhalter Bahnhof, I feel nauseous and yearn for some Austrian sloppiness. When I go in Paris to the opera, I bless the Viennese box dynasties. English understatement leaves me cold. I couldn’t care less about American civilisation, where you take a lift to heaven, so that you can piss upon the culture here on earth. But I’m the kind of Austrian who realises that Austria as a concept is only essential to the Habsburgs and the Viennese.
my own translation (edited for clarity)

Original cover of the hardback edition of 1963.

Despite his popularity in the 1940s, Ernst Lothar was sidelined and forgotten from the 1960s onwards and is still not as well-known as he should be, even in German-speaking countries, although there has been some debate in the media in recent years about this lost masterpiece of his. It might not be of much interest to anyone who isn’t as fascinated by Austrian history as I am, but it’s a fascinating combination of naivety and cynicism, of charm and humour, as well as sudden outbursts of anger and danger. I find The Angel with the Trumpet certainly comparable if not superior to The Strudlhof Steps by Heimito von Doderer, and, despite its bulk, only wish it could have been longer.

I’ll end with the epigraph Lothar uses for the book, by Austrian writer Franz Grillparzer: “If Austrians knew better what Austria is, they would be better Austrians; if the world knew better what Austria is, the world would be better.” This book is a good starting point to discover Austrians (to be taken together with Thomas Bernhard, Hilde Spiel and Johann Nestroy), or at least Viennese.

#GermanLitMonth: A Biography of Marlen Haushofer

Daniela Strigl: Wahrscheinlich bin ich verrückt… Marlen Haushofer – die Biographie. (I’m Probably Mad: the Biography of MH) List, 2007.

I was planning to read several novellas for German Literature Month (and thus fulfil a double function, to fit Novella in November Month too), but I got sidetracked once I finished Marlen Haushofer’s The Loft. I had acquired this biography of Marlen a year or two ago, after being so impressed with the few books of hers I’d managed to find and read in German. I knew the broad outlines of her life, but this time I could not resist delving a little deeper.

Marlen was born Maria Helene Frauendorfer in 1920 in Upper Austria. Her father was a qualified forester, while her mother was also descended from a forester family but had tried to escape her family fate by working as a maid for a noblewoman in her youth, travelling all over the world and staying in luxurious hotels. Marlen was a lively little girl who enjoyed the great outdoors and the freedom of wandering in the forests, playing with animals, listening to stories told by her favourite uncle – she later described those early years as quite idyllic, although she did suffer when her brother Rudi, the apple of her mother’s eye, was born.

All this was well-known to me. What I did not realise was just what a fall from paradise it was for Marlen to be sent to a convent school in Linz at the age of ten. She was one of the brightest girls in her class, but she was homesick, became depressed and succumbed to TB. She interrupted her studies to go to a sanatorium, and then fell promptly ill again. She finished school just after the Anschluss and was forced to do a year of civil service on the eastern borders of the German empire. In 1940 she started studying philosophy, German and art history in Vienna, which is where she met Manfred Haushofer, who was studying medicine. I knew that they got married in 1941 but what I did not know was that before the wedding Marlen had given birth to a little boy whose father was not Manfred, but a German student whom she had met a year earlier. Manfred accepted her illegitimate child, but he lived apart from them for a long time, even after they had a son of their own in 1942.

Manfred and Marlen settled in the little town of Steyr (a truly provincial town not far from her parents in Upper Austria) and opened a dental clinic together (Marlen helping out with the admin). Although this should have been a lucrative business, Marlen’s husband proved hopeless with money, always dashing after shiny gadgets and cars and other women, so they were never very well off. Marlen started writing, and had her champions in Vienna, but overall was not taken very seriously by the Viennese literary circles and experienced multiple rejections. Although she moved in the same circles as Ingeborg Bachmann, Ilse Aichinger, Thomas Bernhard, she was often mocked as the ‘provincial egg, the dentist’s wife, the forester’s daughter’.

I had always wondered why Marlen divorced her husband in 1950, only to then get remarried to him in 1958. I suspected he was a serial womaniser, which was true, and the last straw was when he had a serious relationship with one of Marlen’s best friends. However, I was stunned to discover that they continued to live in the same house and work together in the dental practice, that very few people (not even their children) knew that they were actually divorced, and that they both pursued other relationships during their years of estrangement. Marlen did not seem at all blind to her husband’s faults, nor was she deeply in love with him any longer, so why did she remarry him? She once told a friend that ‘you cannot be divorced in Steyr’. Perhaps, like the narrator in The Loft, she craved the comfort of routine. Perhaps she was disappointed by her occasional forays into Viennese cultural life and the other men in her life proved disappointing as well. She complained about not having enough time to write, of being a victim of her domestic arrangements, and yet she seemed reluctant to rid herself of her chains. As one of her writer friends said: ‘You know where you are going wrong, Marlen? If your husband asks you for a slice of bread and butter, you immediately make three for him.’

Her health had never been brilliant, so she mostly ignored the hip pain that started plaguing her in the mid-1960s. In 1968 she was diagnosed with bone cancer, which she kept hidden from friends and even her immediate family for as long as she could. This was a family where hardly anything was ever openly discussed. She died just a few weeks short of her fiftieth birthday in 1970.

The biographer Daniela Strigl interviewed family members and friends of Marlen Haushofer, as well as researching the archives. I wasn’t entirely convinced by her extensive use of quotes from Marlen’s novels to illustrate biographical details, but am not sure what else she could have done, because Marlen systematically destroyed all of her diaries (with one small exception) and the letters she received. Luckily, some of her correspondents kept the letters she sent them, but even then it would be a mistake to believe that this enigmatic author always meant exactly what she wrote. She wrote for maximum effect, in what was often a devastatingly cynical way that was in direct contrast to her apparently settled bourgeois housewifely existence. She was such a secretive person that her friends could never quite agree what she was like, whether she was happy or not – or even the colour of her eyes.

I’ll end with a few quotes from Marlen’s writings, some from her fiction, some from her personal papers:

You should never ask for too much, then you can never receive too little.

I find myself here in a place where I do not belong, living among people who know nothing of me, half of my strength is wasted on the effort of remaining inconspicuous. The older I get, the more I realise how hopelessly entangled all of us are, and I envy the person who never becomes aware of this.

She has become that friendly, slightly distracted woman who goes for a walk with her child, reads novels, receives her guests, puts flowers into vases, and generally feels life trickling away from her gently, without regrets. One of the many women whose will is broken, who are no longer really there. No matter how she chooses to live her life, she will sit there on that stone today, with the suspicion in her heart that she has picked the wrong path.

In spite of all my efforts, I seem stuck… I have the feeling, I am wasting all of my strength. I would not take pleasure in writing a successful book if I had the feeling I had let my family down. I really think it is impossible to be a good person and a good artist at the same time.

Marlen’s final letter, a sort of literary testament, which she wrote a week or so before her death, is truly heartbreaking, yet without the faintest hint of self-pity or self-indulgence:

Do not worry. You have seen too much and too little, just like everyone before you. You have cried too much, maybe too little, just like everyone before you. Maybe you have loved and hated too much – but not for long – twenty years or so. What are twenty years anyway? After that, part of you died, just like it did for all people who can no longer love nor hate […] Do not worry. Everything will have been in vain, just like it has always been. A completely normal story.

This is my last contribution to the German Literature Month extravaganza, but do please head over to the website hosted by Marcia (aka Lizzy Siddal) to see what other people have read this November.

Reading Summary September 2022

After the physical and emotional turmoil of August, September has continued somewhat in the same vein, the only highlight being the couple of days I got to spend at Bloody Scotland. My reading, therefore, continued to be a mix of translations (four out of eleven books), escapism (two uplifting books) and grit (six crime stories).

Paul Gallico’s Jennie was just what I wanted to cope with Zoe’s loss, while Lolly Willowes was witty and liberating, although I perhaps stretched things too much in comparing it with Tomb of Sand. I was sympathetic to but more ambivalent about the female rage displayed by Mareike Fallwickl and Anke Stelling – I could see what both books were trying to achieve (I think), but feel they might have fallen a little short of their ambitions. HIgashino’s Malice was a clever manipulation of the reader and a psychological study of envy and bullying. You can see what our Crime Book Club thought about it here, thanks to Rebecca Bradley’s recording.

Five more crime books in quick succession on my journey to Scotland and then after I fell ill with Covid: Danuta Kot for the realistic depictions of gangland warfare and poverty in the north-east of England, Lisa Unger for sheer page-turnability about the horrors of online dating, Jane Casey for posing questions about the justice system vs. personal morality, Elizabeth George perorating at some length about FGM, and Emma Styles for a refreshingly accurate rendition of Australian teenage girls’ voices, from very different strata of society.

But the best read of the month was made up of Javier Marias’ loopy sentences and tangential observations about everything under the sun in the first volume of his trilogy Your Face Tomorrow. I have underlined the book liberally (yes, shock, horror!) but will review it when I complete the entire trilogy.

For October, I am keeping any reading plans very flexible, as my mind is flitting about too much at the moment (plus, I will be translating extensively, which always makes me want to seek out different things than I might normally choose). I have read a lot of books that are suitable for the 1929 Book Club, but am not sure if I will read a new one for the occasion. I might reread the quintessential example of Balkanic decadence and nostalgia by Mateiu Caragiale Craii de Curtea-Veche (Rakes of the Old Court).

Two German-Language Books About Womens’ Rage

Mareike Fallwickl: Die Wut, die bleibt (The Lasting Rage)

Anke Stelling: Schäfchen im Trockenen (Keeping Your Sheep Safe – translated as ‘Higher Ground’ by Lucy Jones, Scribe)

Back in 2014, I read Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs and encountered a woman’s raw, unfiltered anger for the first time. I loved it, although it divided readers and led to an upsurge in debate about ‘unlikeable’ characters (which seems to be even more of a no-no when it comes to female characters). There have been other books since which explore what might happen when women refuse to go along with the script handed to them, live up to people’s expectations, be meek, silent people-pleasers: Naomi Alderman’s The Power, Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen. Generally, these women are condemned, viewed as unnatural, earn a bad reputation that lingers on for centuries (Medea, anyone?). No one likes a loud shriek of rage, too shrill, too hysterical, right?

Yet I can’t help but be fascinated by these books, where women are suddenly allowed to enact those fantasies of verbal (and in some cases physical) revenge that we daren’t let ourselves think about. I think I have a natural predisposition to be very gentle and kind, but I occasionally wonder if my tendency to be so forgiving is merely cowardice and conflict avoidance.

The two German-language novels I recently read both start with women being perceived as victims and then transform into women as avenging creatures (angels or demons? up to you to decide). Both Germany and Austria are more conservative when it comes to women’s place in society, so it is refreshing to see that this literary trend is making its way there too.

Austrian writer Fallwickl’s novel is set in Salzburg and at the very start, Helene, a mother overwhelmed by family demands during Covid lockdown, commits suicide by jumping from the balcony while the family is having dinner. Her best friend Sarah, a childless writer, used to slightly envy but mostly pity Helene, but she steps in to help out with the children, thereby making the widower’s life far too easy, as Helene’s teenage feminist daughter Lola keeps scolding her. Lola and her friend are assaulted by some boys at the skatepark and the two girls resolve to learn how to fight to protect themselves… and soon become part of a group who call themselves #WeAreKarma, taking revenge on the men who have wronged women. It’s an interesting glance at generational differences in interpretation of feminism, and how the desire for stability or family makes us compromise our most treasured principles and values as we grow older.

Unlike Lola, who seems more concerned with the wider social oppression of women, from domestic violence issues to abuse of minors, from body shaming to gender fluidity, Sarah is discovering how motherhood in a society where the political and domestic issues mirror each other, and that doesn’t offer much support for mothers, often spells the end of self-realisation:

‘You can’t imagine how bitter you can become about the father of your children… motherhood is a ship and at some point you realise that you are sitting in it all on your own. You are surrounded by dark currents, you have no oars, no compass.’

‘But who is steering the ship?’ asks Sarah.

‘You realise that only later,’ replies Helene, ‘It’s the men. The politicians, society. We mothers have no power. We have the entire burden, but no power.’

The moment of awakening, when Sarah chooses to replace the rhetoric of self-pity and doubts with a fighting spirit, comes when she is called into school because Lola pushed her PE teacher, who was insulting her and another classmate about their body weight. Sarah’s initial reaction is to apologise, to smooth things over, but suddenly the resentment that has been building up over the years spills out of her and she stands up for Lola, even threatens to create a scandal for the school.

When they were told back then that it wouldn’t hurt to give in, to apologise, to not kick up a fuss, to keep your head down, how did they know that it wouldn’t hurt? Maybe it did hurt them. Maybe it hurt them greatly.

German writer Stelling’s novel is set in Berlin, against the backdrop of the city’s increasingly problematic housing situation but has some similarities with Fallwickl’s story: an angry woman in her forties trying to explain things to a teenage daughter – except in Stelling’s case we don’t get to hear much of the daughter talking back and educating the mother.

Resi is an author, married to an artist; they have four children but not all that much disposable income, and are subletting from one of Resi’s old schoolfriends. However, Resi’s latest book took a swipe at her friends, for their bourgeois attitudes and love of material comforts, upon which she is served an eviction notice and, unsurprisingly, her friendships unravel. The novel is in fact the narrative she writes for her teenage daughter, reminiscing about the past, how she always felt less accepted by the group because of her social background. It is a howl of disappointment, self-justification and social critique, entertaining, relatable, but also quite revealing of a stubborn character with a chip on her shoulder, keen to emphasise her ‘higher moral ground’.

Just like in Fallwickl’s novel, we can understand the frustrations of the character up to a certain point, but we might question some of her choices or her interpretation of events. Resi recognises that she has fallen victim to society’s expectations of what a happy family should look like and what they should do, but she cannot help building up her expectations every weekend, and then being bitterly disappointed. The description of the Saturday breakfast is funny – but the laughter is painful, because so recognisable. Nobody wants to come to the table, nobody cares about the fresh pastries from the bakery, they sit silently and glumly, or complain about the food, or they make noises while eating.

I’ve fallen for the Weekend Lie again: the one that says it’s nice to have breakfast together on Saturday, when no one has to rush off anywhere, with fresh pastries and smiling faces, with Nutella and love and fruit…

The Weekend Lie is powerful indeed.

It operates on the basis of a ruthless causality: If I’m not sitting with you, it means I don’t like you.

It operates on the basis of simple contrasts: If it’s stressful during the week, the weekend will be blissful at last.

It operates with dogged obstinancy: reappears every five days, all year round, come sun, come rain.

Two interesting though problematic books, with flawed characters but relatable rants. I’ve seen some readers say that these women are speaking from a position of privilege and entitlement that they don’t even recognise – and it is true that compared to women in other parts of the world (or in other generations), their lives are not that hard. But they are, quite rightly, comparing themselves to others closer to them in their own society: rich or childless women, or simply men. Perhaps they also feel a sense of betrayal that earlier feminists told them that once they were working, earning their own money, once employment legislation stopped discriminating against them, they would have it all and be able to do it all. If only they would lean in more… Meanwhile, they’ve leaned in so far that they are toppling off balconies, yet structural problems in society and other people’s attitudes are still not changing enough.

Coincidentally, some of the themes also resonated with a film I’ve recently watched Everything Everywhere All at Once: what happens once women stop being overwhelmed victims or hankering after lost, often illusory possibilities? Can anger be used in constructive as well as destructive ways? I enjoyed the chaotic energy and genre mash-up of the film, as described by the title. This sense of overwhelm and general assault on the senses, thoughts, feelings, memories is what we are all perhaps feeling at the moment, although the film’s resolution was understandably (for we all desire some clarity and simplification) a little too pat. In real life, there are far too many people, including mothers, who never achieve any insight into themselves, and never have a fully-developed character arc. As for using rage constructively, well… we’ve seen how bad we humans tend to be at that.

#GermanLitMonth and #NovNov: Marlen Haushofer

Marlen Haushofer: Wir töten Stella (We Kill Stella). [And a special review bonus: Sara Gran’s Come Closer]

Marlen Haushofer is the high priestess of succinct, almost detached narration that conceals something profoundly moving and horrific. This 54 page novella will pierce your heart and mess with your mind – if you can read it in German, because, alas, it has not been translated into English. You can, however, try and catch a filmed version of it (translated as Killing Stella) directed by Julian Roman Pölsler, who also directed The Wall based on Marlen Haushofer’s far more famous novel. You can catch a short trailer for the film below (in German, also).

The plot is simple: the narrator Anna remembers the past year or so, and how the death of young Stella came about. We know from the outset that Stella died and that our narrator feels somehow responsible for this, so I’m not divulging any spoilers.

Stella is the daughter of an old friend of the narrator Luise (‘frenemy’ would be the more correct term, as Anna despises her desperate attempts to remain young and sexually desirable) and comes to live with the narrator and her family for a year, so that she can attend a commercial school in the city. Initially, the family (Anna, her husband Richard, their fifteen year old son Wolfgang and their younger daughter Annette) are slightly annoyed and amused by the ‘country bumpkin’. Stella is bored with her studies, but seems to have no other passions or interests, dresses badly, and appears incurably naive, shy and polite. Despite Richard’s derision of her, they end up having an affair – a situation that Anna was almost expecting, but that she feels unable to stop. When Richard, an inveterate womaniser, moves on, Stella struggles to accept the situation, especially since she has been forced into an abortion too, and commits suicide – or it could have been an accident, as the family reassures itself hastily. The ‘we’ in the title is significant – every member of the family has had a part to play in driving Stella to her death.

It’s a simple story, but what is fascinating is the ambiguity of Anna as a narrator, and the strange, detached, almost other-worldly voice that Haushofer gives her. Anna is telling this story in first person, while she looks out of the window into the garden – something she does for hours on end, She prefers that to actually going into the garden itself, which has always proved disappointing – she prefers to have that distance and the glass wall between her and reality. She notices a baby bird that seems to have fallen out of its nest, and is struggling to move and calling for its mother. Anna keeps telling herself that the mother cannot be that far away, that she will show up and help, but as the day goes on, the cries of the bird get more desperate, and then weaker. The baby bird dies on Anna’s watch, yet not for a moment does Anna step outside into the garden to attempt to rescue it in any way, in a horrible but telling parallel to the story about Stella. ‘I cannot help him [the bird] and therefore I must try to forget him.’

It’s all too easy to write Anna off as an unreliable narrator, but if she is one, it is because she herself is conflicted and nowhere near as in control as she would like to be. From the very outset, we hear that Anna’s nerves are shot to pieces, that she has become fearful, agoraphobic, almost paranoid – all clear manifestations of guilt. At the same time, she refuses to delve too deeply into her complicity, all she wants is for life to return to ‘normal’. Yet what is normal in this ‘good’ bourgeois household of the 1950s, in conservative, Catholic Austria?

Haushofer is too clever to give us a definitive explanation for Anna’s passive nature, but there are many hints. Anna is treated like property by her husband, whom she seems to fear and tolerate rather than love. She has often thought of escaping her marriage, but is either too afraid, feels too useless, or else has become too cynical about the outside world. She is unhealthily obsessed with her son and fears losing his love and respect more than anything else. Her daughter reminds her too much of her husband, she is one of nature’s sunny, thoughtless people. ‘Annette is too healthy and happy for me to truly love her’, Anna observes, while she herself overanalyses everything, and is therefore stuck in analysis paralysis. She also seems to harbour some suicidal thoughts, almost envying Stella for her ability to break free of this burden called life… and resigning oneself to an unfulfilled life.

I read somewhere that you can get used to anything and that the force of habit is the strongest force in our lives. I don’t believe that. I think that is just an excuse that we use, so that we don’t have to think about other peoples’ suffering, or indeed about our own suffering. It is true that humans can bear a lot of things, but it’s not because they get used to it, but because within them there is a faint spark of hope that some day they might break free of the habit… If the first attempt to break free is unsuccessful – and it usually is – then we try again, but the second impulse is weaker, and leaves us even more bitter and beaten up.
And so Richard continues to down his red wine, and chases after women and money, my friend Luise continues to chat up men young enough that she could be their mother, while I continue to stand in front of the window and stare out into the garden. Stella, this stupid young person, was successful at her very first attempt at escape.
My own translation.

You could argue that female emancipation has come a long way since the 1950s, but I still know so many women (not just of the older generation, but of my age and younger) who are clinging onto unsatisfactory relationships for the sake of the children or for financial reasons, and tell themselves stories that enable them to continue to lead their lives without rocking the boat too much.

It is incredible how much the author manages to fit into very few pages, how complex the thought processes are, and how much there is to read between the lines. Every word counts with Marlen Haushofer. This is tightrope walking on the very edge of the precipice (or the verge of a mental breakdown) and you keep reading to see just how the narrator can pull it off.

Sara Gran: Come Closer

The ambiguous narrator in Gran’s short novel (almost a novella, 165 pages with lots of blank spaces) is not just on the verge of a mental breakdown, but actually plunges into it before our (horrified) eyes – or rather, into demonic possession. Amanda is a successful architect who has just moved into a rather lovely loft apartment with her husband. It starts off with unexplained tapping noises, escalates with unprofessional conduct at work, uncontrollable urges to shoplift or hurt others, start smoking again or hooking up with strangers in bars. And it just gets more and more self-destructive and dangerous to others from there onwards. Amanda thinks she knows her demon, a beautiful wild woman called Naamah, and she makes sporadic efforts to exorcise her, but at other times she is exhilarated by the things the demon makes her do… and we start to wonder if it isn’t a split personality or some form of schizophrenia. Or perhaps another attempt at escape – a far more active one than Marlen Haushofer’s Anna.

Of course she fought at first. They all do. And then they see the possibilities and they’re happy to go along. She could have gone on forever, in her small lonely life. But sometimes the door to a bigger life opens, and it isn’t so easy to say No. You can’t spend your whole life saying No. Sometimes you have to say Yes, and see where it takes you.

I love the ambiguity of it, that there are hints at Amanda’s past or the small dissatisfactions in her present-day life which might make her susceptible to ‘demon attacks’. This book too has a real sense of malevolence and menace, although the horror is more graphic than in Marlen Haushofer’s work. Both authors, however, have a slightly detached, almost deadpan style at times, the kind of voice I can hear echoing for days afterwards in my head. Ultimately, just like with We Kill Stella, this book refuses to give us any clear-cut answers. Both these stories fit into a long line of prestigious ‘uncanny’ portrayals of the female psyche by such writers as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Shirley Jackson or, more recently, Carmen Maria Machado.

#GermanLitMonth and #NovNov: Casanova’s Homecoming

Arthur Schnitzler: Casanovas Heimfahrt. This novella has been translated into English but is not easily available (you can get it via CreateSpace or second-hand). And yes, virtually all of my German Lit Month books are novellas, so that I can complete two challenges at once.

I read this a long, long time ago, in my teens, but when I reread it last week for #GermanLiteratureMonth, I realised that I had actually mistaken it for Mozart on the Road to Prague by Eduard Mörike (which I had also read before). So naturally, I was expecting a wistful meditation on art and mortality and instead got a much more insalubrious piece of work.

Yet I think there is far more about mortality and hubris in this novella than one might initially think, and it’s not coincidental that it was written at the end of the First World War, a war which reduced Austria from an empire to an insignificant landlocked country with an oversized capital city.

It’s 1778, Casanova is 53 and hanging about in Mantua, waiting for his home town of Venice to pardon him and allow him to return after a 25 year exile. He comes across an old friend, Olivo, whom he helped to get married 15-20 years ago, who is eager to invite him to his house. Olivo has done well for himself, he has three daughters, a thriving farm, and he seems happy and content. Everything that Casanova, for all of his past glory and adventures, is clearly not. He is aging, he has to rely more and more on his reputation or on the favours of older women, rather than being able to seduce whomsoever he chooses.

He is finally persuaded to visit Olivo’s estate, with the hidden thought that he might seduce his young niece Marcolina. However, the niece is a bluestocking, far more interested in her studies of mathematics than in this lecherous old man. Casanova suspects she is not quite as virginal as her aunt (somewhat infatuated with Casanova herself) makes her out to be, and she seems indeed to be in love with the dashing young soldier Lorenzi. Casanova recognises something of his own younger self in the charisma and insouciance of Lorenzi – so of course he hates him on sight and plans a diabolical trick to blackmail the soldier and seduce Marcolina.

So far, so typically Casanova, the man who cannot curb his sexual appetites (but of course imagines that he is in love with almost every woman he seduces). But there is more nuance here: for the profligate rake has started to worry about his legacy – in particular, he wants to write a polemical paper against Voltaire and wants to consult Marcolina about it – a first for him, to recognise a woman’s intelligence and ask for her opinion. Secondly, he is being invited back to Venice, but with a mission to spy on potential rebels and freethinkers, which angers and disgusts him.

Casanova is clearly at a turning point in his life, suffering a bit of an identity crisis. No longer rich, no longer sought after, the younger generation no longer know about his legendary deeds. There is one passage in which he almost regrets that he didn’t pursue anything in life seriously enough: he should have spent more time with writing and philosophy, he should not have wasted his talents as a financier or diplomat, but he threw it all away whenever a woman showed up. But he then realises that he doesn’t regret frittering away his time and energies on women – that he has lived his life like no one else. However, he only really seems to come alive when he starts talking about the past with his hosts (and often embellishing things – which may have given him the impulse to write his memoirs).

Just when you think that Casanova might be learning something in his old age, that he might be redeeming himself, he veers back onto the well-trodden path of vice, greed and selfishness. There is a particularly nasty thread there where he seduces the thirteen-year-old daughter of his host, simply because she happens to be there. Of course, he ends up accepting the job as an informer too.

A stroke of inspired casting here: Alain Delon as the aging Casanova in the 1992 film version.

Casanova’s memoirs were translated into German for the first time in 1913 and Schnitzler was fascinated by them. With a little help from Freud and other psychologists popular at the time, he saw Casanova as a narcissist who cannot really relate with the world, because the world itself does not interest him other than as an extension of himself, a place filled with people that he wants to dominate. Schnitzler also wrote a comedy about Casanova, entitled The Sisters or Casanova in Spa, which was not at all well received. I am unable to find any information about how this novella was received at the time – although I suspect that after Reigen, he was considered a controversial writer anyway.

Reading Plans for the Rest of 2021

I am really enjoying my aimless September wanderings of reading without a purpose and often with no intention to review. It provides a much-needed break and gives me the time and leisure to immerse myself in the rapidly-changing world of 1930s and 40s Britain, the world of the Cazalets. Although I will be wary of overburdening myself with obligations in the future, I do like to have a bit of a plan for my autumn and winter reading. So here are my current plans (as always, they are subject to change, depending on internal whims and external events).

October: Romanian Fun Reads

Family sagas have not been my cup of tea, generally, but now that I’ve succumbed to the charm of the Cazalets, I was thinking of rereading one of my favourite series of books when I was growing up – the three volume (sometimes published as four volumes) saga At Medeleni (that being the name of a country home in the Moldova region of Romania). I might not have time to sink completely into it, but I could try the first volume, when the main protagonists are children, and compare it with the Cazalets or with the Palace Walk trilogy by Mahfouz, which I also need to finish at some point.

Then I thought I might as well make it a fun month of reading Romanian literature – as in, reading without a professional editorial eye, wondering whether it would be worth translating or not, whether for Corylus or someone else. Here are the books I’ll be contemplating:

Ionel Teodoreanu: La Medeleni, Vol. 1 – The Unsteady Border.
Doina Ruști: Mâța Vinerii (The Book of Perilous Dishes) – YA novel set in 1798 Bucharest, a fantastical tale about a magic recipe book. The blurb says: ‘Merchants, sorcerers, spiritists, cooks of the Princely Court, lovers, haughty young ladies, ambassadors from diverse lands, mercenaries, officials of the Sublime Porte, princes in exile and princes newly enthroned, schemers of all sorts, revolutionaries, Bonapartists, tricksters, and envoys of Sator populate the carnivalesque space of this novel of fantasy, whose deeper levels lead far into the distance, towards worlds we could scarcely imagine.’ The book has received a translation grant and will be published by Book Island in the near future.
Ioana Pârvulescu: Life Begins on Friday – this historical time-travelling crime but literary novel won the European Union Literature Prize in 2013 and has been translated into English.
Bogdan Suceavă: Grandpa Returns to French (my own translation of the title – untranslated collection of short stories). I know the author slightly, worked with him briefly on the same literary journal, plus he was born in the town where my parents live now in Romania. He is a Mathematics Professor at a university in California, but is a highly skilled prose writer.
Radu Pavel Gheo: Good Night, Children! The story of four childhood friends, growing up in Communist Romania, who all dreamt of emigrating to the ‘promised land’ and return to their home country and their friendship in their thirties; older but are they any the wiser? The story of my generation, I suppose.

November: German Literature Month and Novella in November

I’ve always taken part in the German Lit Month and want to take part in the Novellas in November one too this year, since both of these initiatives are hosted by some of my favourite bookish bloggers. (Novellas in November is hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of BookishBeck and I believe their definition of novella is any work under 200 pages). So I’ve found a way to combine these two themes by choosing to read German-language novellas. Or, very short novels in some but not all cases. If you’ve read the original announcements for German Lit Month on Lizzy’s and Caroline’s blogs, you’ll have seen that the plan is to read:

Books from Austria 1-7 Nov: I have a collection of short stories by Marlen Haushofer, which includes the novella-length We Kill Stella.
Books from Germany 9-14 Nov: Irmgard Keun: Child of All Nations, transl. Michael Hoffmann (almost a novella, only 180 pages long)
Books from Switzerland 15-21 Nov: Friedrich Glauser: The Spoke (again, novella-length – only 130 pages)
Books from Elsewhere 22-28 Nov: Mrs Mohr Goes Missing, a crime novel set in Krakow in 1893, when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, written by a dynamic Polish writing duo publishing under the pen-name Maryla Szymiczkowa, transl. Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Here, There and Everywhere 29-30: Dana Grigorcea: The Undying. This sounds like an utter wild card, a vampire crime novel that isn’t really about vampires by a Romanian author writing in German and living in Switzerland.

December: Russians in the Snow

Under Karen’s (aka Kaggsy59) nefarious influence, I have been steadily adding to my pile of Russian books, and it always feels most suitable to read them when curled up inside with the wind blowing a blizzard outdoors. Even if they are set during the hot summer months spent in the countryside. Last year I managed to read The Karamazovs and was planning to reread The Idiot this year, but the book (in the translation I really like from the Raduga Publishing House in Moscow) is at my parents’ house in Romania, and I am not sure I will get a chance to pick it up before then. Therefore, I am wisely selecting quite short works this time, allowing myself room for sudden lurches in mood.

Bulgakov: Diaboliad, transl. Hugh Aplin – satire about Soviet bureaucracy
Victor Pelevin: Omon Ra, transl. Andrew Bromfield – a satire about Soviet space race
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, transl. Anna Summers – There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In – well, it will be the month when my older son comes back from his first term at university!
Marina Tsvetaeva: Poems (maybe comparing different translations, although of course I can’t read the original Russian)