Sunday 19 October 2014

Some Ideas for German Literature Month IV

Recently, Lizzy and Caroline announced that the fourth edition of their German (-language) Literature Month would be going ahead in November, and the question for me, as always, was not whether I'd be taking part (as if...), but what I'd be reading.  So, off I went to look for some inspiration, and here are a few of the ideas I came up with - feel free to steal any you like the look of ;)

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The first stop was the German-language corner of my personal library, where I discovered several likely candidates for November's reading.  While I'm waiting for his new book to come out in paperback, Peter Stamm's debut novel(la) Agnes should tide me over, and Sybille Lewitscharoff's Blumenberg, a book I didn't get to during August's Women in Translation Month, also looks interesting.  A book that's been languishing on my shelves for a long time now is Hans Keilson's Das Leben geht weiter (Life Goes On) - I wonder if I'll get to it this time around...

There are also some heavyweights among my collection.  Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten is a book I'm eager to try, and Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants) would be the third W.G. Sebald novel to be read and reviewed on the blog.  But if I read those, will I have time for the Heinrich Böll short-story collection Erzählungen, or one of the three related novels in F.C. Delius' Deutscher Herbst (German Autumn) trilogy...

Next, attention turned to my Kindle, where I had a host of classics stored and ready to go.  How does Robert Musil's Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusions of Young Torless) sound?  Or Adalbert Stifter's lengthy, impressionistic novel Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer)?

Then there are some of the writers whose work I've meaning to revisit - I still haven't managed to get to the second part of Gottfried Keller's Die Leute von Seldwyla (The People of Seldwyl) cycle, and Theodor Storm's Eine Halligfahrt (A Hallig Journey) and Lena Christ's Lausdirndlgeschichten (I'm not even going to try to translate that one) have been on my TBR for a while now.  But what about the Joseph Roth week to end the month?  Surely I can fit in Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker (The Legend of the Holy Drinker)?


A little fatigued by the overwhelming number of possible choices, I started to browse online sites to unwind, only to end up looking for more books.  With few female writers among my choices, perhaps Christa Wolf's Stadt der Engel or The Overcoat of Doctor Freud (City of Angels...) or Anna Seghers' Transit might be worth getting.  Also, having enjoyed Jenny Erpenbeck's Aller Tage Abend (The End of Days) recently, why not try her earlier work Wörterbuch (The Book of Words)?  But that would mean not reading another by Thomas Bernhard, and I really wanted to get a copy of Alte Meister (The Old Masters)....

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In the end, I'm afraid it all got a little too much for me, and I had to go and have a rest.  However, I'm sure I'll have worked it all out by the time November comes around.  Please come back then, and see what made it through the final cut - viel Spaß dabei ;)