Discussion Shortlist German Book Prize 2015
We discuss the novels on the short list of the German Book Prize 2015. Members select one of the nominated books to present to the book club. Drop-in guests and “listening-only” guests welcome!
The German Book Prize is presented to the best German-language novel just before the start of the Frankfurt Book Fair as an annual award from the Foundation of the German Publishers & Booksellers Association. The nominated novels:
Jenny Erpenbeck: Go, went, gone
How do you bear the passage of time when forced to be idle? How do you deal with the loss of those you have loved? Through a chance encounter with asylum-seekers on Oranienplatz, Richard, professor emeritus, conceives of the idea of looking for answers to his questions where no one else is looking for them: amongst these young refugees from Africa stranded in Berlin, condemned to wait for years. Jenny Erpenbeck tells a story of looking away and looking at, of death and war, of eternal waiting and of everything that lies hidden beneath the surface.
Rolf Lappert: Through the winter
Lennard Salm is fifty and enjoys significant success as an artist around the world. When his oldest sister dies, he goes back to Hamburg and to the family he has always been trying to escape. He wants to return to his own life as quickly as possible. But what is that anyway, one’s own life? Salm’s younger sister Bille loses her job, his father is becoming increasingly helpless. Salm is needed and he himself needs advice. Over the course of one sparkling winter, Salm gets to know his parents and siblings again and discovers that no one is ever alone.
Inger-Maria Mahlke: As you wish
August 1571. Elizabeth I reigns over England, and Mary Grey, her cousin, is angry. Twenty-six years old and small in stature, she has a claim to the throne. What Mary Grey wants is to be free, to be the mistress of her own household and to have custody of her stepchildren. She gets none of this. Yet instead of taking it lying down she rebels and decides to write a report – a reckoning with the royal court. In the process, she discovers that her and her family’s conduct has been just as arbitrary and contingent as everyone else’s. And that there are initial signs that the family will be merciful and will take her back again.
Ulrich Peltzer: The better life
Jochen Brockmann is a successful sales manager, but he gets tangled up in a collapsing system. The bank won’t give credit anymore, Indonesia isn’t investing, the Chinese present themselves as an option. Sylvester Lee Fleming is an unscrupulous wheeler-dealer, financial investor and risk advisor. He shows up as a saviour, seducer and tempter. Those who were young in the 20th century dreamed of a different society. These political utopias have turned into terror, and former revolutionaries have become managers, players in the economy. A metaphysical thriller about the 21st century and the ghosts of the past.
Monique Schwitters: One another
One evening, while googling her first love instead of writing, she discovers that he threw himself from the eighth floor. Almost five years ago. She is shocked – as much about his suicide as about the fact that she hadn’t even missed him. And so the protagonist in Monique Schwitter’s novel sets off on an amorous investigation: Her romantic biography deals with twelve men – the almost mystical outlines of men, whom, through writing, she fills with love, life and history. At the same time, her current romantic situation moves increasingly out of the background to centre stage.
WINNER:
Frank Witzel: The Invention of the Red Army Faction by a Manic-Depressive Teenager in the Summer of 1969
Gudrun Ensslin as a Native American squaw made of brown plastic and Andreas Baader as a knight in shining black armour – the world of the child narrator, who resurrects the cosmos of former West Germany, is no less real than the political events that hold those years in suspense and which the 13-year-old tries to make sense of in his own way. In the process, memories of post-war Germany, hints of the German Autumn and observations about the present take him further and further away from his environment. The result is a kaleidoscope of the moods of a world that, just like East Germany, became history in 1989.