Fwd: Books Update: The 10 Best Books of 2011

Sat Dec 10 06:54:33 CST 2011

Add Jan Brandt's "Gegen die Welt"! I read its more than 900 pages in 
less than six days, so there must be something to it. Not that I liked 
everything. But the author manages to keep the threads in hand all along 
the way. And his language is beautiful and precise at the same time. So 
please give it a try!

http://deutscher-buchpreis.de/de/455324/

Katy Derbyshire, in her blog, wrote an English review and also provides 
a translated sample.

http://lovegermanbooks.blogspot.com/2011/10/jan-brandt-gegen-die-welt.html

*Jan Brandt: Gegen die Welt*
"927 pages. 927 pages. I for one do not usually read books this long, 
because I tend to get bored. So it’s quite an achievement for a book of 
927 pages if I even pick it up in the first place. Let alone read it all 
the way through.

But here comes the full disclosure: I met the author Jan Brandt at a 
drunken party the year before last. And I remember being quite impressed 
because after I spouted off high-octane vitriol on some subject or 
other, he had a similarly vitriolic tale to tell. This, I thought, is a 
man who knows how to hate, and to package that passion in an 
entertaining form. Actually I didn’t think that at the time, but I do 
now. Which is probably like meeting aged ska legend Laurel Aitken still 
in his cardigan in the ladies’ toilets before a gig and assuming he’s a 
pervert rather than just not having his glasses on. But that’s another 
story.

Anyway, to get back to the main pre-strand to this piece, a number of 
people subsequently told me how amazing Jan Brandt’s book /Gegen die 
Welt/ 
<http://www.dumont-buchverlag.de/sixcms/detail.php?template=buchdetail_en&id=9016> 
was going to be, including the author himself. On which occasion he also 
predicted that I would end up translating it. We shall see about that. I 
would certainly relish the challenge, but first a publisher must be 
found who would relish the financial challenge of getting 927 pages 
translated. For the time being, I’m very pleased to have translated a 
sample from the book <http://www.signandsight.com/features/2172.html> 
for your delectation.

So, we have 927 pages and they’re about the inhabitants of a village in 
East Frisia. I know! It sounds like the world’s dullest book. But it’s 
so totally not dull, I assure you. Because Brandt has injected his very 
long narrative with a number of vitalising ingredients. First of all 
there’s his obvious love for the region’s geography. It’s not there in 
the form of overly long nature descriptions of the D H Lawrence variety, 
more in the details of fog or sudden snow, bike rides between fields or 
the marks the railway has left on the land. Then there’s his contempt 
for some of his characters, mostly the minor ones like the local 
businessmen busily undermining each other to the ultimate detriment of 
the village. And his affection for others such as the main character’s 
mother and his friend Volker, an obese underage smoker with a 
pessimistic outlook on life.

And of course the plot. Because far from being an autobiographically 
based ramble through Daniel Kuper’s youth as one might expect, the novel 
is held together by a fairly complex storyline. Or several, to be 
precise. But mainly the one about Daniel, whom we meet on the day he 
meets Volker, aged about six. A fairly confident little boy, he later 
falls victim to bullies and is then apparently abducted by aliens. The 
entire village, indeed the entire world, seems to believe that the 
Plutonians have landed in a corn circle and kidnapped young Daniel, 
leaving him semi-naked, bruised and unable to explain what has happened. 
>From then on he’s the village outsider and becomes a scapegoat for all 
manner of things.

At grammar school he makes new friends and ends up getting drawn into a 
bullying incident himself, with dire consequences. The boys involved 
never talk about what happened, but in the course of the book every one 
of them dies young. These deaths are announced in advance by our 
omniscient narrator, so I’m not giving too much away here, and yet that 
just makes for even more compelling reading. The grammar school section 
is told in a remarkable way, in two parallel strands juxtaposing the 
boys’ rather banal lives with the more tragic tale of a local train 
driver – separated by two parallel lines just like a train track. For 
me, this was writing that doesn’t just play with form for art’s sake – 
there is a point at which the two strands do meet, and that apparent 
impossibility is a moment of shock, just like arriving at infinity would be.

The locals’ stories are peppered with pop cultural references, and I 
particularly enjoyed the ironic references to /Dallas/. Daniel’s father 
is the philandering J.R. who runs the village drugstore, constantly 
competing with his rivals the chemist and the supermarket manager. Then 
there are the biblical references, the village going by the name of 
Jericho and rather a lot of religion going on there. Plus the closeness 
to the work of Uwe Johnson, particularly /Mutmassungen über Jakob/, 
which I haven’t actually read but is set in a place called Jerichow. 
Lots of heavy metal music, and I also fancied a spot of David Foster 
Wallace in there too, what with the complexity and rather a lot of 
/Jeopardy!/ – including as a metaphor. And illustrations of adverts and 
posters. And smatterings of Greek and Latin. And paranoid letters to the 
chancellor. And long lists of people or groceries that are actually a 
joy to read. And every time a car appears we’re told its make and 
vintage. And I’m sure I’ve missed a great many more references. Manic 
realism <http://www.gegendiewelt.de/jericho/?page_id=81>, the author 
seems to call it. In fact the literary world that is Jericho is so 
saturated that he’s provided a useful reference work 
<http://www.gegendiewelt.de/jericho/> online.

It’s not a novel that makes you want to move to the countryside. The 
atmosphere in oppressive and aggressive, especially as Daniel gets older 
and the swastika raises its ugly head. As the details settled in my 
mind, I thought I made out a political message about what people in 
Germany are willing to believe in order to shift the blame for their own 
extremism. But maybe I didn’t. It could just be an attempt to document 
very ordinary lives in an un-boring way. Strangely though, while I 
normally can’t relate to less ambitious novels about growing up in 
obscure corners of West Germany – not having grown up in any corner of 
Germany myself – I found /Gegen die Welt/ had a broader appeal.

Masterfully, the novel closes with a section told from Volker’s 
perspective as an adult. But rather than coyly tying up all the loose 
strands – which it does to some extent – it throws a whole new light on 
other aspects. And it ends suddenly with"

On 09.12.2011 23:44, Dave Monroe wrote:

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: NYTimes.com<nytdirect at nytimes.com>
> Date: Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 4:27 PM
> Subject: Books Update: The 10 Best Books of 2011
> To: against.the.dave at gmail.com
>
>
> Books Update from The New York Times Friday, December 9, 2011
> -----
> To view this email with images, go to:
> http://www.nytimes.com//indexes/2011/12/09/books/booksupdate/index.html
> -----
> - On the Cover of Sunday's Book Review -
> The 10 Best Books of 2011
> The Book Review picks the year's best fiction and
> nonfiction.
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/books/10-best-books-of-2011.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema2
>
> 100 Notable Books
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/books/review/100-notable-books-of-2011.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema2
>
> Selections by Michiko Kakutani
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/books/michiko-kakutanis-recommendations-for-2011.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema2
>
> Janet Maslin
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/books/janet-maslins-recommendations.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema2
>
> Dwight Garner
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/books/dwight-garners-top-10-nonfiction-books-of-2011.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema2
>
> Notable Children's Books of 2011
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/books/review/notable-children8217s-books-of-2011.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema2
>
> Notable Crime Books of 2011
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/books/review/notable-crime-books-of-2011.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema2
>
>

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