Here we are on the seventh week! Time is flying by!
Okay, as promised, last week was exceptionally busy for me, but this week is already better. I will be able to jump back in!
As I said before, I’m so glad to see your comments still, so please continue to feel welcome to use this as much as you can. I hope your October is a wonderful one!
Here is the post for any and all discussions about passages from October 2 – 8, 1967.
For the main page of this read-along, please go here.
So many wonderful character sketches in the book: Dmitri Weiszand, officially categorised as German when he entered the US, but the life of anyone from Eastern Europe in the 20th century cannot be summed up in just one word. Emmy Creutz who looks after the graves in Jerichow: at first glance so businesslike but then we find out about her husband and his first wife. I love this circling method of characterisation, where we discover something more troubling, more complex about a person every time we return to them.
Lovely detailed description of life in Richmond, a posh enclave then and now, and probably hard to bear for any outsider.
I wonder why Gesine is now referred to as Mrs Crespahl rather than Miss.
October 3 – three graves maintained. I think we may find out who Jakob is soon. My guess is he is Marie’s father.
As I understand it the reader of Uwe Johnson’s work would know about Jakob already, as he is the main protagonist of his debut novel Mutmassungen über Jakob (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutmassungen_%C3%BCber_Jakob) which also features Gesine.
So seems we may all have dived into this book too soon without sufficient pre-reading!
Interesting!
That is interesting. I am going to have to read that one now too.
Marina, I didn’t see your post when I started posting in this week. Sometimes they take a while to appear I guess. Anyway, I don’t want to seem rude by having appeared to ignore it.
Loved yesterday’s entry. With only a couple of sentences it is clear that the Ford Mustang has been introduced fairly recently, Gesine is unimpressed, but Marie wants something cool and her opinion is what counts.
I am not sure I’ve ever seen a yellow Mustang. I had a red one of that vintage but many years later, I’d guess 20 years old. They are great.
October 8th – disconcerted to not be able to understand much of this entry as I don’t know French. Does everyone in Germany know French, making it okay to have such a large passage?
That’s where a Kindle copy and google translate comes in handy!
Colette, not everyone in Germany knows French – if they did, the right decision would have been to translate it. I was ambivalent about this, in general I’m a translate-everything kind of guy, but I decided to leave it and not add the book’s only footnote or bracketed explanation, nor just erase the Frenchness and give the dialogue in English. I’m not sure it was the right decision, but there it is!
I think you made the right decision, Damion, but perhaps Uwe Johnson made the wrong one. I think I am reading the argument referred to in the previous paragraph and I think it is between Frederik and Gesine, or is it between the three of them?
This entry is in the Kindle sample so I guess I will do what fulcherkim suggests, an option that would not have been available when the original was published.
Evidently you can’t use the highlight features in a kindle sample which is fair enough. I will just have to assume that what Uwe Johnson wanted readers to glean from the passage is that the women were arguing with the man, who was drunk (that is given to us in the previous paragraph supported by Marie’s comment).
It’s basically FF berating Annie and Gesine, for their European attitudes, including about Vietnam. The other part of the dialogue is beaten-down Annie who keeps saying “Don’t say that, Frederick.” Clearly a terrible marriage, and cross-cultural interplay managed a lot less successfully than elsewhere in the book. Anyway, don’t worry, there’s no crucial information you’re missing, otherwise I do think Johnson would have given it some other way.
Been abroad for a week, so have fallen behind with comments. Oct. 5: Gesine searches archives of Inst. for the Promotion of British Culture to research Richmond, where Cresspahl lived for a while, using the local paper. Unable to put ‘flesh’ on the ‘skeleton’ of her stories about him for Marie, she can at least this way ‘go looking for a coat for him.’ The front pages of the 1932 editions have ‘sensationalist, rather common ads’ – Kelloggs Corn Flakes, etc. She marvels how such brand names ‘outlive us’, and cites several more. Then this: ‘You’d say this was one of my disconnected thoughts. It wasn’t meant as a thought at all, though. Just a feeling. An emotional reaction, you’d call it.’ I find this one of the more interesting aspects of a narrative that at times seems to me a little too full on inconsequential detail (those ads; who cares?), found information; the address to ‘you’, whoever UJ means by that (the reader? Marie?) adds a layer of mystery, while this section itself, self-referential as it is, serves as a comment on the text as a whole. It’s impressionistic, and even reflects on this quality in the text itself. Now I’m almost done with vol. 1 I find I’ve warmed to the project a bit more again, but I still think there are too many longueurs. But then there’s a nugget like this that makes the long passages of tedium worthwhile.
Chilling coda to the entry for today’s date, Oct. 9: that year (still 1932?) Adolf Hitler, ‘with the help of an amenable senior official in Brunswick’ became ‘an official citizen of the German Reich.’ Quick check online suggests it was 1932. This parallel narrative – the rise of Hitler and the Nazis – to that of Gesine and her ancestors, works well. I’m less taken with the over-frequent quotations from the NYTimes…Maybe I’m missing something about texture, palimpsests or something.
Thank you, Damion.
My assumption on the French ranting and raving was that the reader was being placed in a child’s position upstairs, and FF has switched to a language that his children don’t understand for grown-up talk. (At one point he complains that Annie and the kids talk about everything in Finnish, but very little in English with dad) I can’t decide whether Marie perfectly understands everything or just can hear the tone and see the faces during the discussion.
It’s such a jarring contrast to the description the day before. The Hudson is beautiful and clean, the trip is for Marie to get away from the addicts and crime of the city. It seems to be teasing what life could be like with DE and plenty of money, but somewhat unintentionally shows the negative side of typing your freedom and prosperity to a powerful man.