October News and Highlights

Letter from Hudson Street October 2018 Dear Readers, In this month’s newsletter, we’re doing something a little unusual: we are dedicating a substantial portion to the celebration of one book, Uwe Johnson's [Anniversaries](. Yes, this is the very big book we've mentioned before, and we couldn't be more thrilled to finally put it out into the world. To that end, we thought we'd help you get to know the book and its main character, the indomitable Gesine Cresspahl, with some help from the book's translator Damion Searls, the film world, and one very talented designer. A few of the usual bits are still in here, too, and we've gathered some favorite answers to our query for underappreciated classics from last month. Those are really fun. All that and more below. Best wishes, The NYRB Staff On Translating Anniversaries For [Damion Searls](, translating Johnson's Anniversaries has been a labor of love. He spoke to us about why he was drawn to this behemoth of a masterpiece, what he likes so much about Gesine Cresspahl, and more. What first attracted you to this massive project? The hook for me was that it takes place on 96th St. and Riverside Drive in New York, three blocks from where I grew up. The playground Gesine and Marie go to is the one I went to every day as a kid; their subway stop was my subway stop; their gorgeous, poetic Hudson River sunset views were out my window, too. But for all its New York local color, the book is one of the great German novels of the century, simply one of the great novels of all time. I came to admire it more and more over the years I worked on it. Why should a 21st-century reader care about this book? When I started on the project, I thought the Sixties headlines felt shockingly contemporary: political polarization, police brutality against African-Americans, John Sidney McCain III shot down over Hanoi and captured (that was just a 1967 news item!). Then, for a while around 2016–2017, I started to feel like the story of the Nazi rise to power was the timeliest part of the novel – how fascism looks and feels in everyday life. I now think that it’s Gesine’s experience. She reads The New York Times every day, rather than constantly checking Twitter, but she too is a responsible, well-informed, ethical person trying to stay on top of an absolute tsunami of obviously vital, brutal, world-historical news, and at the same time just live her life, raise a family, be a normal decent person. Trying to be human while being battered by history is the 2018 experience in a nutshell. What is your favorite part of the novel? My favorite quality it has is that for all its richness and density it’s such a page-turner, with these short chapters; as I’m reading about New York I want to get back to the German story, and vice versa, and he keeps it up for hundreds and hundreds of pages. Each day bounces the German past, the New York present, and Times-reported world events off one another in a new way. It’s hard to pick a favorite single chapter but I’d have to go with the one that starts on p. 1098, taking place in the summer of 1946, with thirteen-year-old Gesine on a friend’s farm helping out with the Mecklenburg wheat harvest while pining with love for Jakob. Johnson is going toe-to-toe with Tolstoy’s hay-mowing chapter from Anna Karenina, and pulling it off. What do you like about the character of Gesine Cresspahl? She’s an incredibly real character—all the more impressive for being written by a male author, especially since she’s a mother, a professional, an immigrant, an incisive analyst of historical forces, not solely or even mainly the subject or object of a love plot (unlike Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, etc.). Which is not to say that she’s “androgynous”: she’s a woman leading a complex woman’s life, love and sex included. It’s been striking to me how many women readers of this book I’ve talked to were struck by something that I, as a male reader, had been largely oblivious to: how meaningful it is that the center of this massive, high-European tome about History and Memory and Nazi Germany and The Cold War is a single mom and her daughter together—the feminine, domestic core of the book is absolutely crucial. Who would play Gesine in a movie? There is a German miniseries already, directed by Margarethe von Trotta and playing in New York in November as part of the Goethe Institut’s mini-film-festival around Anniversaries. I’ve seen the trailer but I didn’t want to watch the movie, because Gesine (Suzanne von Borsody) didn’t look like my mental picture of her. I know, that’s a cop-out. Well, Gesine is a smart, savvy, insightful woman in her mid-thirties, attractive and aware of it while usually having other things more on her mind. She’s unsentimental, even to the point of sometimes seeming cold, but she has very good reasons for being guarded, needing to make it on her own in New York, having lost her mother and the father of her child, having been betrayed and damaged by her country’s Nazism and then Stalinism, and now dealing with America’s pathologies. The actress would have to exude intelligence and seem armored while gradually revealing the pain underneath. Michelle Williams? Anniversaries Events Damion Searls will also be speaking about translating Anniversaries at the following events: Tueday, October 16, 7pm at [Community Bookstore](, Brooklyn with Edwin Frank Thursday, October 18, 7:30pm at [Green Apple Books on the Park](, San Francisco Co-sponsored by the Center for the Art of Translation. Tuesday, October 30, 6pm at [The Rosenbach](, Philadelphia Part of the In Conversation with the Rosenbach series. Thursday, November 1, 7pm at [Goethe-Institut](, New York with Renata Adler and Liesl Schillinger In addition to the November 1st event, Goethe-Institut will also be hosting a film series related to the book later in November. Designing Anniversaries Since NYRB has never published a book at quite this scale, getting the design of the Anniversaries was very important. We decided on a boxed set of two volumes. Then, enter [Joanna Neborsky](, the amazing designer who brought the book's milieu and characters to life on the cover of each volume and on the box itself. Neborsky even made a time-lapse video of the evolution of her design, which you can watch at the link below. Summer in 1960s NYC In 1968, when he was living in New York and in the middle of writing Anniversaries, Uwe Johnson helped a German television station produce a film about life in his new home, titled Summer in the City. Johnson did not want to be featured on camera (though the television station asked), but he picked many of the spots to be filmed and wrote the narration. The film, directed by Christian Blackwood, is a wonderful way to immerse yourself in the world of Anniversaries, which takes place in New York between the summer of 1967 and 1968. Watch the trailer for the movie below. Your Favorite Underappreciated Books We received over one hundred responses to our query for underappreciated books that we put out in the last newsletter. It was a nearly impossible to pick favorites, but we gathered a handful of special ones below. Thanks so much to everyone who wrote in, and congratulations to our random winner, Virginia! You'll be getting your books shortly. [Out of Bounds]( by Frances Hill "This long out-of-print book is, I believe, largely autobiographical: it is a watchful and puzzled child’s-eye view of a short period of her very young life which would have been intolerably sad were it not for her devotion to her grandfather and his to her. I have rarely been so convinced of the absolute accuracy of the remembrance of a post-WW2 childhood. Frances Hill, who is British, is better known as a historian with a special interest in the Salem witch trials. Out of Bounds demonstrates that she is quite simply a very good writer." —Anna [Fifth Business]( by Robertson Davies "I recently re-read Fifth Business, by Robertson Davies, first published in the 1970s. Fifth Business is the first of a trilogy, set first in Canada. The trilogy comprises the stories of a (1) boy who threw a snowball at (2) a boy who ducked, and (3) the child born (prematurely) of the woman hit by the snowball, and who fell into a swoon. The snowball contained a stone, and which also connects the three novels." —John [A Month in the Country]( by J.L. Carr "It may be the most moving and beautiful book I've ever read. I'm glad you brought it back....I know I'll never read it again. Usually, I want to reread favorites, but this is the exception. The book made such a strong impact on me, I don't need to read it a second time, and I doubt I could bear it if I tried. I am, however, an indefatigable evangelist for it." —Bob [A Canticle for Leibowitz]( by Walter M. Miller "I studied Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz in high school in Canada in the mid-‘70s. It’s not the sort of book I ever read, but I’ve never forgotten it. Bits of it float back from time to time, and I recall the monk, the poet, the apocalyptic ending. A good book for these difficult times—It reminds me of the poem Ozymandius, and of the biblical phrase Omnia Vanitas." —Ann [Household Spirit](by Tod Wodicka "I tell everyone I’m ever asked about this book and I’ve yet to meet someone who’s heard of it. It’s one of the most unusual I’ve read. Tod Wodicka conjures time, space and memories I often have to double check aren’t mine." —Anna [The Transit of Venus]( by Shirley Hazard "I nominate The Transit Of Venus by Shirley Hazard, a novel about Australian sisters Grace and Caroline Bell making their way in life and love in the UK in the early 60s. It begins with a disaster that orphans the sisters and ends with a disaster that ensures one of them will never consummate the great love of her life, and in between are all the moments that make and unmake lives, rendered in clear-eyed detail and prose so cool, restrained, elegant and lovely that you can commit paragraphs of it to memory like poetry....I rank this shattering book on a par with Middlemarch - together they transformed my consciousness the year I was 21, and gave me a more compelling glimpse of the glories and travails of adulthood than any living person had done." —Fiona [Aye and Gomorrah: and Other Stories]( by Samuel R. Delany "Delany brought a much-needed point of view to SF in the 1960s (and before and beyond!)- queer, black, leftist, but not at all didactic or preachy. His works are highly intelligent and demand some work from the reader, and as such are deeply rewarding. I can't recommend this collection enough!" —Tim [The True Detective]( by Theodore Weesner "An incredibly successful hybrid of the literary novel and the detective story, totally misunderstood — a tragic oversight. This is a deeply felt, very painful (and suspenseful) book. Weesner got attention for The Car Thief, but this one beats it." —John [The Dollmaker]( by Harriett Arnow "I think The Dollmaker by Harriet Arnow deserves to be famous and widely read. Much like John Steinbeck treats the diaspora of Dustbowl refugees to California, Arnow treats the move north from Appalachia to Detroit and other northern cities to work in war industries. I would say, however, that The Dollmaker is better written and of more contemporary relevance." —Gregg Congratulations, Jenny McPhee! Jenny McPhee recently made the shortlist for the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) [2018 Italian Prose in Translation Award]( for her translation of [Family Lexicon]( by Natalia Ginzburg. The award judges hailed McPhee's translation as "the best English version yet of this genre-defying classic." The winner of the award will be announced during ALTA’s annual conference, which runs from October 31 through November 4, 2018. October with Henry David Thoreau Our monthly foray into Thoreau's [The Journal: 1837–1861](. This time, an entry from October, 1852. Thoreau was thirty-five years old. Oct. 15 9 A.M.—The first snow is falling (after not very cool weather), in large flakes, filling the air and obscuring the distant woods and houses, as if the inhabitants above were emptying their pillow-cases. Like a mist it divides the uneven landscape at a little distance into ridges and vales. The ground begins to whiten, and our thoughts begin to prepare for winter. Upcoming Events Sunday, October 28, 5pm at [City Lights Booksellers](, San Francisco Donald Nicholson Smith and James Brook discuss Jean-Patrick Manchette Events with Martin Filler author of Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III: From Antoni Gaudí to Maya Lin Tuesday, October 9, 6pm [AIA New York](, NYC Sunday, October 14, 3pm [John Jermain Memorial Library](, Sag Harbor, NY Wednesday, October 24, 8pm [92nd Street Y](, NYC in conversation with Maya Lin October Books [OMER PASHA LATAS MARSHAL TO THE SULTAN]( by Ivo Andrić [THE KING OF NOTHING]( by Guridi [SWAMI ON RYE MAX IN INDIA]( by Maira Kalman [THE TIGER PRINCE]( by Chen Jiang Hong [ON CHRISTMAS A SEASONAL ANTHOLOGY]( [ONCE AND FOREVER THE TALES OF KENJI MIYAZAWA]( Once and Forever is the October selection for the [NYRB Classics Book Club](. If you join the club by October 17, Once and Forever will be your first selection. In the Press "One of the great values of this brief but highly readable earlier diary is that it was written when the direction of history — whether there would be a war and how it would turn out — was far less clear." –Alexander Stille, [The New York Times Book Review](, on Iris Origo's A Chill in the Air "On the Abolition of All Political Parties never apologizes for its radicalism, and never makes concessions to practical objections. The book proposes exactly what the title promises: Weil wants to get rid of them at once." –Guy Patrick Cunningham, [Los Angeles Review of Books]( "But perhaps the most harrowing aspect of Moderan is its immersiveness: there is no detached observer to state a rational case for de-escalation, and no higher society to calm things down. There are only the basest of desires and the most sophisticated of weapons. Regardless of the era in which we live, that’s a story that’s all too familiar." –Tobias Carroll, [Tor.com]( "Although it’s a book about boxing, the boxing is ephemeral; its true subject is the desperation of broken men struggling to comprehend their howling desires. " –Jim Ruland, [San Diego City Beat](, on Leonard Gardner's Fat City Image at top of newsletter: NYRB offices, October 2018 [Update preferences]( [Facebook]( [Instagram]( New York Review Books 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 [Unsubscribe](