Johnson's Anniversaries (Re: Fitting the News to the Novel (Deborah L. Horzen))

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Long waves beat diagonally against the beach, bulge hunchbacked with cords of muscle, raise quivering ridges that tip over at their very greenest ...

https://www.nyrb.com/products/anniversaries
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0726/9203/files/Anniversaries_Excerpt.pdf?14078901374046244884

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/uwe-johnson/anniversaries/
http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2018/10/18/uwe-johnson-anniversaries/
https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-68137-203-7
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/10/uwe-johnsons-anniversaries-the-morality-of-facts/573118/

"Auch de Rosny verlangt es nicht nach einem Sitzplatz. Lehnt an der Tür, sucht auf den Tabellen an den Wänden, den Schriftstücken auf dem Stahlsekretär nach einem Anfang.
Wer ist das, dieser de Rosny? Was hat sie mit ihm zu tun? War er einer von denen, die am 26. Juni 1940 die Kapitulation Frankreichs im Hotel Waldorf-Astoria mit einem Festessen begingen? Nein, er nicht. Seine Eltern, womöglich. Was die antifaschistische Komponente angeht, so fühlt sie keine Gefahr von ihm; Faschismus ist schlecht für das Geschäft. Weil er die falschen Gründe hat, deswegen mißtraut sie ihm? Was will er in ihrem Zimmer, bei geschlossener Tür?"

Uwe Johnson: Jahrestage - Aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl. Pp. 1470-1471.


Am 06.01.2018 um 13:14 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen:

While Pynchon scrutinizes in Gravity's Rainbow the recent German past (also) to illuminate the American present with its Vietnam War and its ethnic conflicts, Johnson scrutinizes in Jahrestage the American present (also) to make sense of the recent German past.

Deborah L. Horzen: Fitting the News to the Novel. Uwe Johnson's Use of the New York Times in Jahrestage [1999]

http://www.uwe-johnson-gesellschaft.de/images/stories/pdf/johnson-jahrbuecher/jj06/JJ6_Aufsatz%20Horzen.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uwe_Johnson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anniversaries._From_the_Life_of_Gesine_Cresspahl

The first complete English translation, by Damion Searls, will be published in October!

> ... Anniversaries was published in four volumes over the more than ten years that it took Johnson to write it, and as the volumes came out it became clear that this was one the great twentieth-century novels. The book courts comparison to Joyce’s Ulysses, the book of a day, and to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the book of a lifetime, but it stands apart in its dense polyphonic interplay of voices and stories. Anniversaries is many books: the book of a mother and daughter, of a family and its generations, of the country and the city, and of two times and two countries that seem farther apart perhaps than they are.  It is a novel of private life, a political novel, and a new kind of historical novel, reckoning not only with past history but with history in the making ... <

https://www.nyrb.com/products/anniversaries?variant=51442122951