Central European literary life
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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov’s gay brother lives out the final days of the Third Reich in Berlin, writing his life story. Sounds like a great premise for a novel, right? How one writer botched this fabulous book idea.
My review of the novel at Readux
Photo - The Nabokov children: Vladimir (L), Sergey (2nd from R)
Performing Kafka’s year in Berlin
A Greek theater company’s production depicting Kafka’s year in Berlin reflects back on a time of financial collapse and growing menace that is frighteningly reminiscent of Europe today.
Read the full article at Readux
Also a new book about the fight surrounding Kafka’s medical treatment (you did know he was Jewish, didn’t you) at the Czech Literature Portal, which you are cordially invited tolike on Facebook to get the latest literary news from the Czech Republic, former Czechoslovakia and even the former Hapsburg territories of Bohemia and Moravia (yes, I have to travel a lot).
Photo - Kafka’s last love Dora Diamant
Literary roundup: reading material for the rest of your life
On Read Russia 2012, Estonian literature in the latest issue of Transcript and World Literature Today and some Berlin stories
Final Cut: An Interview With Jürgen Fauth
Photo - Travel brochure “Berlin Central-Hotel,” circa 1932. From David Levine’s travel brochure collection.
Final Cut: An Interview With Jürgen Fauth
The writer talks about Fritz Lang, Mephisto, Berlin decadence and whether his debut novel is a German or American work.
Read the full interview on Readux: Reading in Berlin
Photo – From Fritz Lang’s 1928 film Spies
Technology of the night: ‘Kino’ by Jürgen Fauth
“ …the technology of the night, modernity pressed in the service of poetry, culling images from dreams and rendering them visible as if by the light of the moon, for all to see. It was magic.” A review of Kino by Jürgen Fauth.
When Wilhemina Koblitz, called Mina, comes home after visiting her new husband in a New York hospital, the decadence of Weimar Berlin and the magical possibilities of cinema are likely distant from her preoccupations.
Read the full review of Jürgen Fauth’s debut novel Kino at Readux
The 11th International Literature Festival Berlin is underway. Read more here …
Photo - The winning photo of the 2010 ilb photo competition by Ciarán Butler ©Ciarán Butler
My review of Danielle de Picciotto’s memoir of life in the underground Berlin arts and music scene at Readux.
The Beauty of Transgression is a vivid remembrance of Berlin’s gritty, loud last decades of the 20th century, and a meditation on where the city’s unique sensibility is headed.
I interviewed De Picciotto earlier this year in Prague where she and her husband Alexander Hacke were resident artists at the Meet Factory. You can read that article here …
Photo - The view of the Berlin Wall from De Picciotto’s apartment, 1988
The Kafka Bubble
My first article for the Berlin-based literary website Readux on attending a meeting of the Kafka Society, the tangled web that the writer’s manuscripts have fallen into and the rumor whispered into a Kafka scholar’s ear in the 1970s that Kafka was still alive and living in West Germany.
The quiet, beauteous shadow
At the ongoing Mission Creek Festival in Iowa City – which includes Sam Lipsyte, Das Racist and John Waters among many others – Queens-based cooperative Lightful press will be introducing their latest book, Poems from Children’s Island by Sasha Chernyi (also transliterated as Sasha Chernyi and Chorny).
The bilingual edition of this classic of Russian children’s poems was translated by Kevin Kinsella.
Born Alexander Glikberg in a Jewish family in Odessa, the future writer of these clever, genuinely strange poems seems to have had a nightmarish upbringing, including a hysterical mother, a violent father and a brother with the same name (they were distinguished by calling on White Sasha and the other Black Sasha because one was blond the other brunet).
After a chaotic and nomadic youth Chernyi gained renown for his satirical verses. The revolution prompted him to go into exile, first to Vilnius, then Berlin and eventually to the South of France, where he died of a heart attack in 1932 helping to put out a neighbor’s fire
Fellow émigré Vladimir Nabokov eulogized Chernyi by writing, “He left only a few books and a quiet, beauteous shadow.”
