Words, Wars, Books, Peace Prizes, Time, Beats, etc. (or: what are you reading?)

Book Fair Days 
It was the week of the books: the International Book Fair in Frankfurt was on, and parallel to it, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded. I happened to be on the Fair that very day, and thought i would check the news around 1 pm, but forgot about it with all the events and themes that are on there: national + international halls, new media area, guest land New Zealand, and so many author talks, forum discussions and extra events that the best strategy seems to be: just keep your eyes open while you are walking and go with the flow. More about all the impressions later - now back to the Nobel Prize and the peculiarity it brings for that day:

It was in the hall of the established german book publishers that i remembered about the prize and walked up to the next publisher's counter to ask. The woman smiled and pointed to the shelve: "Mo Yan," she said. "We have one of his books, Ullstein around the corner has the larger program." - i walked up to them, and there it was: an on-the-spot wall for the Nobel Prize Winner. Note the neutral poster for all cases / all optional winners:



Mo Yan - Nobel Prize for Literature
Back home I checked my bookshelf - and indeed, I still had the copy of Mo Yan's book "Red Sorghum" (which is titled "Das Rote Kornfeld" in German). It's one of the books I started, but didn't finish, a book with multiple timelines that reach back to the time when Japan invaded China. The red in the title refers both to the Communist party, and to all the blood that was shed.

Reading into it again made me think of one of the recent Prize Winners, Herta Müller, which i read parallel to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's book on Nigeria and the time of civil war there. back then i noted: "2 books, from 2 continents. both are dealing with war, and the hardship it brings on so many levels, the way it disrupts families, regions, futures. the approach of both books: history, seen through personal lives. another parallel: both books are written based on oral memory." The same is true for Mo Yan. It's a hard, painful and complex read, spanning 3 generations, detailed in all aspects: rural life in China, and the hardship and cruelties the family has to go through.

Book Fair Impressions 



A photo series with books, halls, themes and snaphots from the book fair is online in an own post:
International Book Fair Frankfurt - impressions, themes, snaphots

Liao Yiwu - Peace Prize of the German Book Trade
The Nobel Prize wasn't the only literature prize that highlighted the week - in Frankfurt, the most important German book prizest is awarded: the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (more here). The recipient this year is from China, too, but unlike Mo Yan he had to flee the country to write his book. It's Liao Yiwu, who took part in the demonstrations of the Tiananmen-Square in 1989 and was imprisoned for years afterwards due to joining the demonstration, and also due to poem he wrote and spoke on the evening before. His book  "Testimonials" / "Für ein Lied & 100 Worte" is the collected history of political and other prisoners, and was released in Germany a few weeks ago. I read into it. I don't find the words for it. I don't think I can read it. The excerpt alredy haunted me and let me wake in a dream of being imprisoned with my feet frozen in a block of ice. Here's a sequence from a video interview with Liao Yiwu:



To think of all those young students, engaging for freedom of speech and thought, and finding themselves imprisoned for years, tortured, killed.

It's hard to imagine, but then, it's something that happens in so many places. It could have happened here when the demonstations in East Germany started, and when the border checkpoints opened in the first night of reunion. It was partly luck that it all didn't end in a huge bloodshed here, like it did in Prague, or in China. It's something that is easily forgotten: how violent life in Europe was for a long time. The Nobel Peace Prize for the EU, as surprising as it was to hear the news - i guess like most, i expected a name rather than an organization - it brought back the larger picture of history. Since World War II, there are ongoing (or rather: endless), mostly bureaucratic and unsexy meeting of European politicians who all are working on the long and winding road to more community and less nationalism. They are also working for peace. It's not often put like that, but when you open borders and share your currency and work together in science and economy, when you do school exchange programs and a thousand other small and large reforms and get togethers (including european song contests), you are less likely to return to warfare when it comes to difficulties between states, because you are codependent or at least connected on so many levels already.

This video shows how common war was in Europe, it reaches from 1000 to today, and almost every change in borderlines meant war, lives lost, homes destroyed, refugees, vengeance, the next conflict - a spiral of bloodshed.



-- update: and here's an article that sums up a lot about the idea of the EU, by the Israeli ambassodor to France: Peace Price for EU

Howl - Allen Ginsberg
From China to Europe - and now to America: the online course on Modern American Poetry (ModPo) now moves to beat poets. The beat chapter starts with Ginsberg’s Howl – i printed it and listened to the audio while reading. Voice adds so much, especially for this poem, and the desparation it puts into words, which probably goes for many of those who lost their life and future when they found themselves between frontiers: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..  "

*****

It's Monday! What are you reading? This blog post is inspired by the blog series "It's Monday! What are you reading?" which is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey. participating blogs are listed in this Linky Book List

Previous reading blog entries are collected here: bookshelf + monday reads. there also is a visual bookshelf, just click it to get there:



Some lines about me: I'm into roads, stories, places, crossings, and all the things they lead and connect to. I edit BluePrintReview and the blueprint book + lit blog. Apart from being an editor and blogger, I am also an author myself. My new book Worlds Apart just launched:

Worlds Apart: the true story of 2 friends, 2 journeys, and 10 life lessons  
In the global world, a traveler from Europe and a teacher from Asia meet in the web, share their journeys, and the joys, longings, and life lessons that wait along the road. Captured in letters and photos that reach from China and India to Germany and Spain, a dialogue across continents and cultures unfolds: Worl(d)s Apart

Atemschaukel ("Everything") by Herta Müller

(this is part 2 of a book post, part 1 is online here: currently reading: "Half of a Yellow Sun" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

2 books, from 2 continents. both are dealing with war, and the hardship it brings on so many levels, the way it disrupts families, regions, futures. the approach of both books: history, seen through personal lives. another parallel: both books are written based on oral memory.

Atemschaukel by Herta Müller
the english title of this book is: "Everything I Possess I Carry With Me". very different from the original German one, which is on the poetic side, and literally translated means "Breath_swing"- "Atemschaukel".

the first time i read Herta Müller was in November 2009, after she was awarded the nobel prize in literature "for depicting the landscape of the dispossessed with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose."

back then, i read her novel 'Der Fuch war damals schon der Jäger' ('Always, the Fox was the Hunter') - it describes life in Romania under Ceausescu's totalitarian regime, written after she was allowed to leave Romania in 1987. after reading it, i got curious for more of her writing, and came across her poetry collectoin "Die Blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen" ("the pale gentlemen with the mocca cups") it showed a different facet of her work: collage poems, created with cut-out words, pieced together in new ways with a touch of humour and a noir undercurrent.

and now, "Atemschaukel". which leads to a place of pain: a russian work camp in the years after the second world war. it's based on the memories of Oskar Pastior, a friend of Müller. they met regularly to talk about that time. the idea was to create a book together. then Pastior died, and Müller preserved the memory that otherwise would have been lost in this novel, which takes the reader into the cold, harsh, yet also human place. from the books i read from her, this is the one that is easiest to access, but also most painful to read.

here's the start of the official book description:
I know you’ll come back’. These are the words the grandmother of seventeen-year-old Leopold Auberg says to him the night he is collected by Russian soldiers for deportation to a labour camp in the Ukraine. (more: Everything/Atemschaukel)

and here's a passage from a longer blog review that includes some of the personal background:
Müller kindly provides the bare facts in an afterword, telling us that all Romanian-Germans between the age of 17 and 45 were deported to Soviet labour camps after the Red Army arrived in fascist Romania, which capitulated and declared war on Germany. The poet Oskar Pastior and Müller’s own mother were among these deportees, but their experiences remained taboo in Romanian society. Pastior and Müller had planned to write the novel together, based on his memories and interviews with ex-prisoners from Müller’s village in Romania. His sudden death in 2006 threw her off course for a year before she could settle down to translate her copious notes into the novel. Atemschaukel details five years in the camp and a short period afterwards, finally relating Leo’s escape from a loveless marriage in Romania to Austria.
(more: Herta Müller by Katy Derbyshire, Berlin)

a twist of truth
the novel was published in 2009, the same year Müller was awared the Nobel Prize. and then, in 2010, life came up with a bitter twist. a historian discovered that Pastior was a Securitate informant, and spied on colleagues and friends. it was shocking news for all his friends, especially for Herta Müller. she described her reaction and also the situation of Pastior in a newspaper interview which was translated in a blog:

"My first reaction was surprise, and anger. It was a slap in the face. The more details Stefan Sienerth and now Ernest Wichner told me, the more horrified I became. The dossiers show the Romania of the fifties and sixties like a very dark painting. The jails were full. Pastior, just returned from 5 years in the camps, worked as a box-assembler and construction worker, now could finally study in Bucharest. He wanted back to normality, he tried and take his own life into his own hands with a tired, stubborn obstinacy. But they confiscated it once again. The documents show him surrounded on all sides. Several university professors also spy on him. The main fink goes all the way to denunciation. His reports are so vile that one shudders. He was homosexual, like Pastior. One asks oneself if he was taking revenge on personal grounds.

After surviving the work camps, Pastior became an enemy of the State, because the five years of torture made him write some seven poems about it, poems that he was in deep need of. These poems were twisted into a noose: “anti-soviet” was enough. In order to protect himself against arrest, Pastior signed an Securitate-declaration. Returned from camp he now totally free, rather than just freed. My second reaction on Pastior as Securitate agent was sympathy. And the more I contemplate the details of the affair, the more it becomes grief."
- more: blog: Nomadics/Pastior / article list: Liquida/Pastior

it's almost as if real life added a second part and layer to the novel. later more details on Pastiors activities were revealed, including that Pastior was probably jointly responsible for the suicide of the poet Georg Hoprich in 1969.

in a novel, the reader might have wished for a happy ending, for a scene where poetry eventually helps to free the characters from the wounds of a totalitarian regimes. but in real life, things are different. and all of us who never had to live through the open and subtle pressures of a totalitarian system are living on the lucky side of life's options.

(more on Herta Müller in this blog: "Der Fuchs/The Fox" + "Mokkatassen / Mocca cups")

Inge + Walter Jens: Frau Thomas Mann

behind every great man, there's a great woman...
that's what i thought of when reading this book. "Frau Thomas Mann" ("Mrs. Thomas Mann") sketches the life story of the Mann family, seen from the perspective of the wife of Thomas Mann (the german author who wrote "The Buddenbrooks", "Death in Venice", "The Magic Mountain", and received the nobel prize for literature in 1929).

the book also is a flashback of the last century - it starts in 1880, and moves through 2 world wars. the Manns left germany after the Nazi regime took over, and first fled to Switzerland, then on into the States. throughout all the years, Mrs. Thomas Mann made sure that her husband could focus on his writing, and took care of all worldly chores.

i picked the book after reading the biography of Inge Jens in November ("Incomplete Memory"), who wrote about writing the Mann book in it. fitting to the theme, the "Buddenbrooks" will be up in TV this week.

Germany#1: and following the theme of books and reads around the world, here the bestseller novels in germany 2009. the top ranks belong to Stephanie Meyer and Dan Brown, followed by 2 german authors: Frank Schätzing's eco-thriller "Limit", and Herta Müller (nobel laureate 2009) with "Atemschaukel".
.

Herta Müller: Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger

Literary Discussion: Gertrude Stein / Herta Müller
yesterday, i received an invite to join an ongoing literary discussion: "..there is a new question for discussion at matchbook that you might be interested in - about Gertrude Stein and the idea of the 'inaccrochable'. We'd love to hear from you."

curious, i went there. and reading through all the posts, my thoughts started to roam. and returned to the Herta Müller book i read in November, and to Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" in the bookshelf here. so i pieced some thoughts together that probably waited for a place to take shape:

"like Marcelle, the word "inaccrochable" made me think of writers and artists who are censored or persecuted. it also made me think of the self-censorship that has developed in europe by publishers, authors and journalists when it comes to any text or book (or comic) that might be (mis)understood as offensive in arabic regions -- with Salman Rushdie and the scandinavian comic drawer as scary examples of possible consequences.

another author i thought of in connection to censorship: Herta Müller, who was awarded the nobel prize in literature this year, "for depicting the landscape of the dispossessed with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose". in november, i read her novel 'Der Fuch war damals schon der Jäger' ('Always, the Fox was the Hunter') - it describes life in Romania under Ceausescu's totalitarian regime, written after she was allowed to leave Romania in 1987. before that, her writing was censored. reading her book, i felt it sketches an encrypted picture of life in a land of inaccrochable / dispossessed / unspeakable truths."

Herta Müller: Atemschaukel
Following this book, I read another book of Herta Müller now, "Everything I Possess I Carry With Me" - ("Atemschaukel" in German) , which is probably easier to access. and while reading it, i also read some interviews with her, together this turned into this longer blog post on Herta Müller and her book "Atemschaukel", here's the start of it:



Atemschaukel by Herta Müller
the english title of this book is: "Everything I Possess I Carry With Me". very different from the original German one, which is on the poetic side, and literally translated means "Breath_swing"- "Atemschaukel".

the first time i read Herta Müller was in November 2009, after she was awarded the nobel prize in literature "for depicting the landscape of the dispossessed with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose."

back then, i read her novel 'Der Fuch war damals schon der Jäger' ('Always, the Fox was the Hunter') - it describes life in Romania under Ceausescu's totalitarian regime, written after she was allowed to leave Romania in 1987. after reading it, i got curious for more of her writing, and came across her poetry collectoin "Die Blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen" ("the pale gentlemen with the mocca cups") it showed a different facet of her work: collage poems, created with cut-out words, pieced together in new ways with a touch of humour and a noir undercurrent.

and now, "Atemschaukel". which leads to a place of pain: a russian work camp in the years after the second world war. it's based on the memories of Oskar Pastior, a friend of Müller. they met regularly to talk about that time. the idea was to create a book together. then Pastior died, and Müller preserved the memory that otherwise would have been lost in this novel, which takes the reader into the cold, harsh, yet also human place. from the books i read from her, this is the one that is easiest to access, but also most painful to read.

here's the start of the official book description:
I know you’ll come back’. These are the words the grandmother of seventeen-year-old Leopold Auberg says to him the night he is collected by Russian soldiers for deportation to a labour camp in the Ukraine. 

...more: Herta Müller and her book "Atemschaukel


Interview with Herta Müller

also, i looked for an interview with Herta Müller, and found this one: RFE-interview: Herta Mueller On Growing Up In Ceausescu's Romania.
later, i returned to Herta Müller, and read through the first pages again, remembering how i sat there, in the Lanzarote sun, and felt a chill when reading those lines, which are just the start of the discomfort:

"Die Ameise trägt eine tote Fliege. Die Ameise sieht den Weg nicht, sie dreht die Fliege um und kriecht zurück."
"The ant carries a dead fly. The ant doesn't see the way, it turns the fly and crawls back."

*****


This blog post is part of a global reading series. 

Previous reading blog entries are collected here: bookshelf: currently  reading... there also is a visual bookshelf, just click it to get there.

And my own new book... is Worl(d)s Apart. True.

Müller / Obama

nobel prize week. coming with surprises this year.

yesterday, the prize for literature: Herta Müller.
who? - i first thought. and then did a google search. the first thing that came up was the quote of the committee, with he answer to my question:
"who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed."
the second clue that came up is that Herta Müller is shortlisted for the german bookprize. that's why she was interviewed on tuesday, in a rather casual way - not knowing yet what was to come, in an interview titled: "Ich habe noch nie auf einen Preis gewartet" ("I have never waited for a prize)".

and today, the prize for peace: Barack Obama.
"for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples"
and an additional explanation, here, in the BBC article: "Asked why the prize had been awarded to Mr Obama less than a year after he took office, Nobel Committee head Thorbjoern Jagland said: "It was because we would like to support what he is trying to achieve."

not sure about the theory that the Committee awarded the prize to morally shift US politics towards peace in this conflicting times. but what do i know. and what a subversive idea - that the way to peace, after all, rather might be peace prizes than guns ;).

~

update, 10.10.
seems this prize stirs up quite a bit of emotions and reflections, on politics, peace, and the world in general. "which is a fitting thing," a german newspaper commented, "especially as the prize is funded by dynamite."
here an interesting blog link: "An Open Letter to Americans Who Are Annoyed at Obama's Nobel Prize." (check out comments, too).
.

J.M.G. Le Clézio - Raga

since Le Clézio was awarded the nobel prize of literature, i wanted to read one of his books. "Raga" is one of his latest works, a reflection on a continent that often is forgotten: Ozeania.

while reading, i remembered an article i read some days after the nobel decision, and returned to it again. "A little Publisher Hits the Big Time" - it comes with these fabulous last lines:

"Translation isn't a nice thing you do if you can spare it, which is the way most publishers regard it; translation is essential. If evangelizing new, unheard-of authors isn't integral to the reason a person goes into publishing, then why? It's not for the fame, fortune, or the stylish tweed jackets. I have at least one of those, and I'm still pretty miserable.

You have to want this one moment, when you feel sure you've won something good for the culture, that you've introduced something new and important to the world. Even if it only lasts a day or an hour before, you know, reality sets in. Thursday morning. Three people in the office. The New Yorker is on the phone: tell us about this author."

little emerald answers

what i am reading this week... 3 links i came across.

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl - a short story from Yiyun Li, online in the The New Yorker. Plus, an interview with Yiyun Li in the Kartika Review: "I am always a very nosy person and a huge fan of gossiping, and that may contribute to my becoming a storyteller. I like to eavesdrop too, and I think by nature I am very shy so to satisfy my curiosity it seems easier to make up a story than to find out the real story by talking to people, which is a different skill."

Questions and Answers with Chuck Adams - an inspiring interview that is part of a recent series of interviews with agents, online in Poets&Writers: "I think beginning writers tend to not think about a reader. They tend to think about themselves. They think about making themselves sound smart and good, and they forget that this is really all about telling stories. I used to joke that I was going to put a big sign over my desk that said, "Quit writing and tell me a story."

A little publisher hits the Big Time - Le Clézio won the Nobel Price.. and there is exactly one publisher in the States who had a book from him available. a small publisher. Daniel E. Pritchard tells the story as guest poster in The Millions: "You have to want this one moment, when you feel sure you've won something good for the culture, that you've introduced something new and important to the world. Even if it only lasts a day or an hour before, you know, reality sets in. Thursday morning. Three people in the office. The New Yorker is on the phone: tell us about this author."