Olga Grjasnowa: All Russians Love Birch Trees

Every year I am so happy that we have the chance to introduce some really amazing emerging writers to our audiences. Many people take me aside in hallways during the Festival and tell me that this is what we often do best: bring writers that our audience may not know but, in fact, should know.

This year the find that we came across was Olga Grjasnowa. This incredibly talented young woman is clearly going to be a name to watch. Born in Azerbaijan, she writes in German and has lived in Berlin for a number of years.

Her book, All Russians Love Birch Trees, is set in Frankfurt amongst a community of migrants to Germany, and is at once an ironic manifesto but also a very 21st century kind of story. An apt observer of contemporary life in Germany, and particularly the way that Germans talk about immigration ("good" vs "bad" immigrants), Grjasnowa manages to work in racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, anti-Palestinianism and communities of migrants and how they cope, all in one book.

It's an angry book but it's funny and touches on so many issues we see and hear in the news in recent months: terrorism, exclusion, trauma, globalization and much more.

Grjasnowa has been selected as one of the six best up and coming German-language writers and will be at Blue Met in conversation with Will Aitken. One of my most favorite Montrealers, his Queer Film Classic book on Death in Venice is a masterpiece of film analysis. Why Will Aitken isn't a household name in Montreal is beyond me because he is a massive intellect and incredibly gifted. None other than Eleanor Wachtel put me on to him and told me years ago that he is one of our city's greatest intellectuals.

In all honesty, if I had no connection to Blue Met and were to make a list of events not to be missed, this would be at the top: fascinating young writer, topical and critically acclaimed book, and one of the best interviewers and readers that our city has.

No Flag Large Enough: a conversation between Olga Grjasnowa and Will Aitken will take place on Saturday, April 25 at 7pm. Tickets are $10 and can be bought here.

Jenny Erpenbeck: Visitation

Jenny Erpenbeck's novel Visitation is one of the more interesting books I've read lately. It's unusual in form and tone, telling the story of a small country house on a lake near Berlin. The home is the only consistent character in the book and we hear about its Jewish owners forced to leave as WWII grips Germany, we hear about the architect who buys the home (at a cut-rate price in the chaos) from the Jewish family, we hear about the gardener who plans each square foot of the grounds meticulously, and we hear from several other key people as the story of the house and its occupants unfold. In the end, it's a history of Germany, of Europe, but on a micro-individual level.

It's a dark novel in most ways, but the writing is simply gorgeous. Everything seems one stepped removed from the dramatic tension we come to expect in a novel, particularly a novel which explores the dark side of history, but the story isn't moved forward by confrontation or painful scenes.

At certain points the novel seems more like a collection of short-stories, even essays, with titles like "The Wealthy Farmer and His Four Daughters," which catalogues a list of superstitions associated with marriage and young women seeking a husband.

I love history and books on history but one question that always nags at me when I read history is how this war or that calamity affected the individual lives of those involved: not the men in back rooms, smoking cigars and being chauffered around, but the average urban worker, the farmer, the migrant, the teacher. Visitation takes this notion and delves deep into how the outside forces of history invade the "average" person's life in personal and individual (and almost non-political) ways.

It feels like an important book and though I know little about Erpenbeck's story (she was born in East Berlin in 1967) or other work, she is definitely on my radar now with this lovely little novel.

Joseph Roth and his Berlin reportage

As noted in an earlier post, I have been looking around the last few weeks for some books set in Berlin. I got some excellent recommendations (thanks, everyone) and then on the plane from Paris, I suddenly recalled that I had a book of Joseph Roth articles somewhere in my book room (yes, I have an entire room full of books which isn't something I am proud of. I've been trying to fob them off on anyone/everyone for the past year to free up more space which I am NOT replacing with more books!).

What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

Once I was back home, I scanned all the shelves until I found it. Perfect and exactly what I wanted to read after a whirlwind trip through Europe and in the mood for something historical set in Berlin: What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933 is a collection of journalistic pieces that Roth wrote for several German newspapers while he was living in Berlin. They are absolutely fascinating and chronicle the daily lives of average Germans: its immigrants, its poor, its working class, prostitutes, pimps, and homeless.

It's amazing to me how I can read something (I bought the book when it first came out because I've been a fan of Joseph Roth since the reissue of his 1932 novel, The Radetzky March) but then pick it up eight years later and have nearly forgotten it all. I was left with impressions, mainly of what a superlative writer Roth was. Take paragraphs such as this one:

Evening comes, an overhead light goes on. Its illumination is oily and greasy; it burns in a haze like a star in a sea of fog. We ride past lit-up advertisements, past a world without burdens, commercial hymns to laundry soap, cigars, shoe polish, and bootlaces suddenly shine forth against the darkened sky. It's the time of day when the world goes to the theater, to experience human destinies pm expensive stages, and riding in this train are the sublime tragedies and tragic farces, the passengers with heavy loads. (Translated by Michael Hoffman).

Joseph Roth, 1894-1939

More than just the beautiful writing, Roth is interested in the underclasses of Berlin life: not its influential citizens or its bedecked women, not its upright Burgers or society ladies. He is interested in the shop girls, the maids, the omnibus drivers, the rag pickers - and at a time when these stories were so often swept aside. Not only was he a top notch journalist, he had the heart of a truly compassionate truth-teller. The characters he presents are individuals with passions, emotions, pains and loves.

To me, this is the best part of travelling: discovering (or rediscovering) writers whose work you may not know but whose connection to a city or country or region suddenly open up that place and make it a real land full of real individuals, contextualizing its history, giving a glimpse of the lives out on its streets or behind its stone walls.

Lucky for me, I have another Joseph Roth collection (which contains one of the most fascinating short stories I've ever read and one I most certainly do remember: his last story, written just before his death in Paris, called The Legend of the Holy Drinker).