books, books, books

In Germany, when I was not eating or talking to people, I was reading, reading and reading. I don't like carrying hardbacks in my luggage (too much weight per word), so I tried to read all those passed on to me, to leave them there for other people. They were all in German....

I read Daniel Hope's book (in German, already reviewed here), two biographical books involving Israel, another about Italy, and Pascal Mercier's novel 'Lea'.

Michael Degen, the wonderful German actor, had as a Jewish boy, survived the war in Berlin as a 'U-boat' (hiding, often literally, underground), and then got himself to Israel to look for his brother at a time just after the war when the Brits generally did not let the Jews in; somehow his boat managed. Immediately he was recruited for the army, but his rather stroppy temperament made him unsuitable for this, so he did various bits of work, met various relatives, and found himself as an actor in a theatre company months after his arrival. Consider that he did not speak Hebrew before then, and that a German accent might not have been much appreciated. It's quite an achievement. Degen writes very entertainingly; it's his second book after the first one which described the war experiences - you wonder whether his is going to produce a book for every year or two of his life? Only in German.

Saul Friedlaender's (he just got the Peace Prize of the German book trade [association])book 'Wenn die Erinnerung kommt' (when memory comes) is about his war time experiences as a Jewish emigre child in France, which the family had fled to from Prague. Eventually he is placed in a boarding school, and his parents are taken to the camps where they perish. After the war [in France], he goes to live with his state-appointed guardian, before at a rather young age making his own way to Israel. He interleaves this with current scenes in Israel in the 70s, where he now lives. It's interesting; the writing is of a rather higher class than Degen's - Friedlaender is now an academic. The book exists only in German.

Franca Magnani was the Italian correspondent for a German TV station for many years (it would appear). Her book about An Italian Family (only in German and Italian) describes her childhood as the daughter of two anti-fascists during Mussolini's reign. I had not really thought about when Mussolini started operating, but it would seem that it was in 1926, a year after Franca's birth. Her father flees immediately to France, then her mother follows with the older daughter over the mountains (despite being closely guarded by the police and the carabinieri) - later young Franca's grandfather gets permission to take her to join her parents. For a while the family lives in Marseille, but in the early 30s they move to Zuerich in Switzerland where they stay until the end of the war. (Lenin also lived in Zuerich, earlier, and is reported to always having paid his rent and taxes on time). Money is always tight - her father does not have a work permit so the parents keep having to work illegally. There are very active in the anti-fascist movement, and many well-known activists visit their home, many also regularly landing in prison, or occasionally ending up dead. They are constantly observed or spied upon, and the Italian authorities cooperate closely with the Swiss police. You tend to forget that fascism affected many countries directly; Germany maybe got off lightly with 12 years only ... except....

Pascal Mercier's book 'Lea', also only in German, is about a widowed father whose daughter suddenly develops a passion and a considerable talent for the violin. In this case, unlike in Jessica's 'Alicia's Gift', the child is driven not by the father but from within herself. Like all Mercier's books this one is unputdownable, though it does not have the usual density of texture that his other books have, and it is read very quickly. The good news is that his 'Night Train to Lisbon' which I have not reviewed, but I've read, is now almost available in English. Paperback version out in February. It's a tour de force about a teacher from Berne who is close to retirement but suddenly decides, after meeting a suicidal Portuguese woman on a bridge, to go to Lisbon, to find out more about her (or to find her?). It's a great book, very dense, and takes a long time to get through. Ideal for taking on a journey. Make sure you don't accidentally buy Emily Grayson's book of the same name! Here's a fuller review of another Mercier book.

Finally I read Emine Sevgi Ozdamar's book 'The Bridge of the Golden Horn', out in paperback in English this month. It's a novel, though with an autobiographical flavour, about a young Turkish woman who comes to Berlin to work in a factory for a year in the late 60s before returning to Istanbul to study acting. It's very interesting, and very funny about the period in Berlin, her struggles to speak German, learning it from newspaper headlines (of the 'Sun' type of paper), the relationships in the boarding house where they live, with 6 women to a room, and their attempts to preserve their virginity (their 'diamond'). The main character, being quite liberated, makes every effort to lose her diamond... Already in the boarding house she gains an interest in acting, since the chap in charge of the home is an actor himself, who later returns to Turkey to run a theatre (people in exile nearly always do jobs they are overqualified for). On her return to Istanbul she gets a place at theatre school and then becomes very involved in consciousness raising, and trying to experience life as others live it, at one stage making a treck towards the Iranian/Iraqi border to see for herself the conditions of farmers who are reported to be starving (as opposed to trying to help them). Her diamond? She lost that yonks ago.

This book is a bit like Orhan Pamuk's books in that it is quite complicated, particularly so when it reaches Turkish soil (or is the world there less familiar to me?). She has a wonderful way of writing, using very distinct images, eg at one stage describing the students revolting in Berlin as 'chickens' and going off in a long flight of fancy describing Guenter Grass as a famous chicken, the city of Berlin as a chicken shed and so on. Is it something Turkish about using imagery? The author now lives in German working as an actress. It's worth getting!

Intensive weekend

...and a very intensive weekend it was, too. On my first weekend in Chisinau perhaps I should have gone to see the sights, but between going for runs, studying, practicing the piano, doing some paid work, sleeping and THE BOOK I was really grounded at home.

What book? Actually two books, one of them, Murakami's 'Norwegian Wood' I had read before, in English. This was a German translation (and since the 'translated from' was in Japanese I had been unable to identify it as previously read in the bookshop in Vienna). It was a great read - I got into it on Friday night, while listening to Daniel Hope's recording of the Shostakovich violin concertos. (Do my ears deceive me or can Shosty be a bit thin on themes? There seem to be bits of 'D Eflat C B' popping up all over the place, and I could have sworn I heard a bit of his cello concerto as well.) A slightly mysterious book, though not as bizarre as Murakami's 'Wind-up bird chronicle' - this one was more real. I love the descriptions of Japanese life, such as the rituals in the halls of residence, what visitors do in hospital, going out for meals ....The book runs along very (reasonably) happily and it's hard to put it down until you work out whether he's going to achieve what he wants to achieve, or not. Murakami has written lots of books; in terms of believability I prefer this book, but the 'Wind-up Bird' was more surreal which also had a lot of charm. There's usually plenty of sex, but little violence....

But this was nothing, NOTHING, compared to the tour de force of Pascal Mercier's book 'Perlmanns Schweigen'. I don't know why this book has not been translated into English! It was published in 1997 so there would have been plenty of time. Is it the length of the book (over 600 pages with quite fine print)? Is it the fact that the author was a translator, then a linguistics lecturer and now a prof of philosophy, and no-one dares touch his book? My mother could not put it down whilst reading it in Tbilisi, and now I've been the same. I had read his 'Klavierstimmer' before, but this exceeds everything!

Perlmann is a professor of linguistics (imagine...) who has been asked by the company Olivetti to run a 5 week get-together of international linguists in a seaside resort in Italy. There each of five or 6 linguists will produce a paper which will then be intensely discussed. A very prestigious task. Unfortunately Perlmann feels well below par; his wife has died less than 10 months before, and he feels that he is no longer capable to doing his job. It's the fear of being found out as a fraud that drives him almost insane. He manages to organise his presentation to the end of the period, and procrastinates like crazy, in the meantime translating a text from Russian, a language he does not speak (but he's a linguist, and it's amazing what they can do with a dictionary in their hand). Time moves on, anxiety grows and grows, and finally he finds a solution - but suddenly that solution is in danger of causing him catastrophic consequences.

The book is written entirely from Perlmann's viewpoint, based on what he thinks the others are thinking and doing, and how can he get out of this situation. This is masked by physical weakness, not helped by his use of strong sleeping tablets. He gets himself into a total fankle, ending up his conference covered in blood. And the book goes on - as if the end of the meeting is not enough, it goes on and on - because the situation is still not entirely resolved.

The degree of understanding of this guy's mind is amazing - probably most people who work and are treated as 'experts' sometimes have the fear of 'being found out', even if they know all that there is to be known about the topic. In Perlmann's case, this fear becomes almost clinical, and you can feel his racing heart and sweating brow as you move through the book.

In passing the book inevitably touches on aspects of linguistics, as in 'the past is a construct' (people construct their own view of the past, and if they tell it long enough, they believe it themselves), or nuances of the English and Russian languages. That adds considerable interest, though you keep reading to see what is going to happen to Perlmann.

It's a fantastic read - but you'd need to speak good German to understand it and to work your way through all those pages. I see he has written two more books that I have not read....

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The Piano Tuner

A book with a title after my own heart by Pascal Mercier, and not just because it's three days before my own piano tuner cometh. Actually it's only in German - 'Der Klavierstimmer' - does not seem to have been translated into English, nor do any of his other books, or amazon would sell them.

It's quite a fat paperback, with quite a lot of bang for the buck (high word count). Starts very slowly - if I had not been trapped somewhere without anything else to read, I might have put it down again after the first 20 or 30 pages. As I went on, it became less and less putdownable.

Pascal Mercier is a Swiss (and a swish) professor of philosophy living in Berlin, who writes books, not too many of them, in his spare time. Unlike that other heavyweight professor, Alexander McCall Smith who does quite easy reading with a sprinkling of philosophy, Mercier's books are quite heavy (without any obvious philosophy references) - though slightly easier than those by Orhan Pamuk (or is it just because this book is set in a society more familiar to me?).

The book is about a Swiss piano tuner, living in Berlin (no! really?), who works for Steinway (odd bit of product placement here, no?) and who is accused of shooting dead an opera singer in mid-performance. His twin adult children, Patrice and Patricia, who had run away from home after a brief incestuous moment, try to reconstruct what lead to the crime. Each fills a series of exercise books of their thoughts and recollections of their own lives and their parents lives, and these are alternated in the book, so that one constantly sees the same situation from two different understandings. Thankfully, though, the exercise books join up the story line very well.

The beginning is heavy-going, but the reader really does get drawn in, often guessing in advance of what might have happened, and reading on in an appalled and fascinated way to see when Patrice or Patricia will work it out, too. Some events are hinted at, described from a child's understanding, which is then reviewed later.

For me there is an interesting link - the twin's grandmother was a ballerina of Georgian extraction, who researched the history of ballet, also coming across the story of Filippo and Marie Taglioni, a choreographer and his ballerina daughter. Filippo choreographed 'La Sylphide' which I saw in Kiev only a month or so ago, in the same choreography.

Very recommendable for those who like a rather (much) more demanding, much subtler, almost 'detective novel' - and who can read German.