Posts in Category: 2010
Eine Frau in Berlin
Received a new book in the mail today. I have said it before, I will say it again; the mail rules!! (except when it consists of bills and fast food ads). It’s like getting gifts every now and then, especially since I have the memory of a gold-fish, I always forget I’ve ordered something, and when it arrives I all like, ‘huh… heyyyyyy… nice!’
Eine Frau in Berlin
Anyway, the book is an anonymous diary by a woman in Berlin 1945 at the time when the Russian army entered the city. I am promised a brutal chaos of rape, pillage and women yet again getting the raw end of a bad deal.
Can’t wait to sink my teeth into this one, even though I might have to set it on the back burner for a little while and finish my exams first. Since it is in German, it might take a while.
Whatever happened to good old fashioned tennis rackets?
The other day I got the urge to learn to play tennis. There are some tennis courts close to my home so this means all I need is a tennis racket. So what do I do? I go online and on to a search-and-compare site to find tennis rackets. I type in tennis racket, click go, and…. I don’t know, maybe I am a bit naive, but when I think tennis racket I actually think about the bat with the oval frame strung with nylon which is used in the physical, outdoorsy sports activity. What I found was a bunch of Wii and Playstation games with accessories, and a couple of designer tennis socks. But then again, why on earth go online when you have a sport shop specializing in sporting equipment 2 streets away? What’s with the lack of common sense (read laziness)?
Stille dager i Mixing Part
Erlend Loe - Stille dage i Mixing Part
I was reading Erlend Loe’s latest novel ‘Stille dage i Mixing Part’ (Quiet days in Mixing Part) when this thought sprung up on me again. In one of the first pages is printed the exchange between two parties (a norwegian woman, and a German couple with a house for rent). Now, the town in which the German couple live in is called Garmisch-Partenkirchen and, due to the lack of English skills by the German couple, they run it through a translation program into English, and the town ends up being called Mixing Part. Being that English is not a force with the elder generation of the German-speaking population, this passage is funny in an ‘aw’-kind of way. The fact that blind trust is being put into a translation engine just says it all about our relationship to these new devices. We often forget to reflect and keep a critical sense when we get dazzled. Not that it is a decidedly bad thing, I mean, why not Mixing Part? Common sense out the window or laziness?
The novel is narrated from Bror Telemann’s point of view (Telemann for short) and with a massive amount of the novel riding on dialogue the reader has much more room to imagine scenes and expressions. Basically the couple are having a marital crisis which they resolve one summer holiday in Germany (kids and all) by having affairs, one at a physical level and one on a (slightly disturbed) emotional level. It is so clear through the dialogue that this couple have been at a stand still for too long, their conversations are bland and their outbursts are not really outbursts. The famous mid-life crisis label could easily be put on Telemann, but for the fact that I don’t get the feeling he is consciously unhappy in his life, he seems more out of sync with his life. His greatest passions in life are theater and Nigella (the sensuous chef) concocted by, and played with in his fantasy. His obsession with seeing everything as theater distances him away from his family and reality to a point where he is up shit’s creek with only a toothbrush (you will get this if/WHEN you read the book, believe me it’s funny and gross).
Telemann is also a kind of ‘I’m more intellectual than thou’ type of person, which makes his nonsense and actions even more hilarious. Your everyday non-hero with a side order of unreliable narrator. It’s like Loe wanted to give the stuck-up a beat-up. And he does it so well 😀
Herbjørg Wassmo II
Herbjørg Wassmo is an interesting lady. She says stuff like: ‘God bless birth control, study loans and the washing machine.’ And she laughs with a charming tickle in her voice, the kind that makes you laugh whether you want it or not. But the most interesting thing about her is her presence. She is the kind of woman you would have anxiety attacks approaching (I did). It’s not due to the fact that she is famous, but because of the ‘can’t-put-my-finger-on-it’ blend of experienced elder and rebellious child.
The dialogue between her and Anette Dina Sørensen, apart from a few cross-linguistic hiccups, was affable. And as an extra titbit the actor Karin Bang Heinemeier read passages from Wassmo’s latest book. She talked about children, being a child and emphasized quite a few times the importance of individuality. How the family quite often was the first assault an individual had to relate itself to, assault both as a physical and psychological entity.
Hundrede År - Herbjørg Wassmo
She also stressed how important it was for a mother to be able to step out of the glorified role of Motherhood, and escape the pedestal she was placed on. Accepting your mother, sister, aunt as an individual first and foremost would only be of gain to yourself and to them. And through the passages that were read to us, I got a sense of just how much the individual meant to her. How does a person, a writer, describe another person, or for that matter herself? Is it possible even to capture Individuality when you are mediating thoughts, actions and feelings of someone you have conjured up?
This makes me think about Roland Barthes’ claim that the author is dead, that she/he is of no importance to the work, the key to it is language and the one with the key is the reader.
I imagine Wassmo can concur with this. At one point Anette Sørensen talks about a passage in the book where the pastor and one of the leading women (both married to other people) are in the church, and Sørensen reads it as they are having sex. Wassmo (with a chuckle that makes the whole house smile) says that this is entirely up to her, she has not explicitly written this but laid heavy emphasis on the passion which doesn’t necessarily leads to the physical act of sex. And then says, that when the book is out there, it is out of her hands. She has no ownership of it.
It is interesting though, because she has not completely given her writing up to others without feeling that the work reflects her, and so that it is part of her. With the exception of this one (so she said) she has always felt angst when releasing a book. What would people think, say? And so maybe this latest book is like catharsis for her.
I would recommend reading something of Wassmo, and as one man in the audience said, ‘if you know Norwegian, do yourself a favor and read it in its mother tongue so you get the scent of local dialects too.’
Happy reading.
Herbjørg Wassmo
Herbjørg Wassmo - The picture is from The Royal Library, www.kb.dk
I remember reading about a girl, Tora, who lives in a small, shabby island community in the northern part of Norway with her mother and stepfather in the 1950’s. She is a ‘tyskerunge’ and this has great consequence for her. The hatred towards Germany is great after WWII, and any sign left of the occupation is unwelcome. Tora is bullied, her stepfather abuses her and her mother is struggling with herself and survival. Tora must find ways to survive or get by in life in spite of the adversity.
It was one of my favorite books growing up. I was intrigued by this term and what lay behind it. It was also another entry point to WWII, which I had knowledge of as a war, but not so much what kind of consequences faced a big part of the world both during and after.
Later on, Wassmo wrote about Dina, which was so popular it was made into a movie called ‘I am Dina’. And now Wassmo is out with ‘Hundre år’ (A hundred years). She joins the ranks of novel writers exploring the generational tale with the recount of the women in her family. The book is definitely on my to-buy list, maybe I’ll even go nuts tonight and buy it in the bookstore and get it autographed 🙂
The Book Thief
Bedtime reading for this month has been The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.
The Book Thief - Mark Zusak
The narrator is Death himself, seeing color where death occurs and taking a liking to a little girl named Liesel, who lives with foster parents at Himmel (did anyone say loaded?) Street. Through Death we learn about Liesel’s life. Her constant nightmares about her dead brother leads to a bonding session with her stepfather, who helps her in her struggle to learn to read well. Her mother (the communist) who has ‘disappeared’ and the boy next door who craves a kiss from her. All is set in and around WWII, where people are acting strange, children are being punished by terrified parents for smearing themselves with charcoal in an attempt to imitate the great Jesse Owens, or displaying negative feelings about Hitler in public.
The narration as interference
The point that Death is the narrator is interesting. He is not an intrusive narrator in the classical sense as the one butting in on every sentence, knowing it all and letting the reader know his omnipotence. He knows everything and remarks it at times, but mostly he is someone who hovers over the story and gives tips and tiny remarks at selected areas. I am partial to stories that have historical footnotes, tidbits and ‘did-you-know-facts’ inserted in novels. I like the humane, not too artsy, feeling a story gets when you actually place it in context and the narration itself makes an investment in the story. One other such book I think of here is Junot Díaz’ ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’. Here the footnotes are a big part of the story. Normally it is a mantra ‘If it is a sentence put it in the text’, but Díaz uses footnotes as a way to interfere with a reading process that is linear, by breaking it off at places, introducing historical facts, character descriptions, cultural references and slang explanations. I am no expert, but I do see these kind of techniques more and more in modern and post-modern works and am leaning towards the attitude the reader has taken to books in modern era.
The increasing fast pace in daily activities has spread its wings out on literature as well. We read faster, more disperse, scan pages looking for buzzwords, and don’t really take time to think the story through until after we have read it and can contemplate its effect while multitasking other activities. And mostly literature allows you to do so. A lot of reading material is almost meant for quick consumption, think later. And this is where, as I see it, the literature with commentary (in lack of a more termish term!) does its best at breaking the reader into bits. Like saying ‘if you can’t concentrate on this, you will have missed something. Read me!!’, or ‘hey man, slow down, where’s the fire?’ In no way is this technique THE way of interfering with a fast reader, but it is a very ‘in-your-face’ technique. I know I have a very conservative way of thinking when it comes to books, but I can’t stand to read something just to fill the hours in a day. Excuse my french, but hell no! Books/literature can be many things, used in a number of ways and with different stances, but I just feel: if you are going to write/read a book that is just over in 2 hours, leaves no impression but an ‘hmm’ and uses valuable tree resources just to keep the book industry alive, then why bother? (but wait, will you not care when it is electronic? Well, yes and no, the book will still be crap, but no trees were harmed, and it is as simple as ‘Delete’ to wish the bad experience away, PLUS the attitude ‘wade through shit to get to the good part’ seems to be a self-maintained factor in literature.)
That special power
The Book Thief is now a quarter read. Liesel has just discovered one of her stepmother’s customers’ library and I feel kinship with her enthusiasm for the book and all it stands for. The book also introduces the incredible power a book can have when it does have something to say. The burning of books is a violent symbolic action, but also very half-thought impulsion. The thought process doesn’t go away if you burn the physical entity. Granted, it can impair the spreading of said thoughts, giving it a royal kick in the funsies. But in other areas it can be the exact royal kick in the funsies that literature needed. It is often said that great art is to be found in recession. An inclination towards the struggle and pain being positives and joy and uncomplicated life acting as negative counterparts. As long as one remembers not to revel in sorrow, but remember that the struggle is in fact to get to some kind of unity and meaning.
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