Reading Group
Online Book Club: “The Peacock”

Read. Talk. Share.

Thu, 03/17/2022
7:00 PM - 20:00 PT

Online

Read our book of the month and join us for a discussion online! Simply register via Eventbrite to receive the Zoom access info. Let's keep reading and sharing experiences with the material! ​

The Goethe Pop Up Seattle book club is free and open to everyone interested, but participants must purchase the individual texts themselves and are expected to have read the title to be discussed prior to the meeting.

Feel free to read this month’s selection, Der Pfau (English: The Peacock) in English or its original German. The discussion will be in English.
Registration About the novel:

A charmingly run-down country estate where a peacock has gone mad, a group of bankers on a team-building exercise, an ambitious psychologist, a spirited housekeeper with a broken arm, a clever cook, Lord and Lady McIntosh, who have to balance everything, plus lots of animals - soon no one knows what's actually going on.

In her first novel, Isabel Bogdan, an award-winning translator of English literature, tells the story of a weekend that turns out very differently than planned, with British understatement, wit, and surprise. Banker Liz and her department of four want to improve their cooperation in rural seclusion but are thrown off course by the spartan ambience and a berserk peacock. Lord McIntosh's pragmatic problem-solving sets in motion hilarious events that push the participants to their limits and bring them closer together. A surprising onset of winter, the flu and a short circuit do the rest.
(Kiepenheuer & Witsch Verlag)

About the author:

Isabel Bogdan was born in Cologne and studied English and Japanese. She is an enthusiastic Hamburg-dweller, reader, writer and translator into German (including Jane Gardam, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nick Hornby, Jasper Fforde). Her first book Sachen machen came out in 2012, followed in 2016 by The Peacock, and in 2019 by Laufen. She has won prizes for her translating, her writing and the online interview project “Was machen die da?”