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A review by heyincendiary
Anniversaries II: From The Life Of Gesine Cresspahl by Uwe Johnson
5.0
I actually read the newer translation by Damion Searles, which Goodreads doesn't seem to have. I haven't read the older abridged version, but my partner has and she says it's absolutely night and day. There's a lot of compression apparently going on in the old one, and this is a book where more is always better.
There's not enough praise in the world for mankind to heap on this project. It's not just great: it's important. By any right, it'd be as important as Joyce's Ulysses. It's not as lyrically experimental or as groundbreaking, probably, but in ambition, in intellect, in every other measure it's the equal of that book. If Joyce's task was trying to dramatize the feeling of being an Irishman at a time when the Empire was crumbling and one had to reconcile oneself to both a brutal past and an uncertain future, to understand what belonging to that kind of polity meant, this book takes the same mission and applies to a world racked by the wars that failing Empire produced. It offers the same diagnostics - a focus on a small set of characters at a particular time in history - but adds in voids of time where the needle of its incredibly detailed, finely recalled personal histories just... skips. Sometimes for five years, as in the entirety of the second World War, and sometimes for longer or just for days. It uses that to explain what happens when nationalism, ideology and the forces of history collide in the smallest of battlefields: a single village. And what happens to a product of that place when she decides to escape.
And it does all of that with singularly masterful prose and a protagonist who thinks in every way like you, the reader, do: circularly, full of trivial concerns that connect themselves to big ones, personal judgments and habits of thought that emerge from the impossible situations she has found herself in and that survive long past their expiration date, weird suspicions she examines, weird suspicions she doesn't. Gesine herself is photorealistic, and if nothing else, you will keep reading for that.
But you'll read it for other reasons, too, because when you locate a character like that in the most momentous period in recent history - the end of the Weimar Republic, the advent of the Third Reich, the fall of the Third Reich, the partition of Germany, and later, the height of the Cold War as the United States conducts a vicious war in Vietnam and comes apart at the seams under Pres. Johnson - you come to really see a time and a place and a people as they were. The power of the technique is remarkable, and Johnson must have realized it, as the project apparently dominated his life for decades, until he died in England with only Gesine for company, in the Eighties.
The dedication, in a word, shows.
The final book has its problems. There are clearly points during which Johnson's focus slipped, and a plot that felt - for all its detours - disciplined in the first volume starts to exhibit lapses that seem less deliberate. Not flubs, exactly: the details are all present and correct. Rather, there are things you'll wish Johnson spent time on that he seems to forget to. There are places he lingers he shouldn't, and places he should go that he doesn't. You get the sense that he could have continued this for another 365 "entries" if he had the time and health, but sadly, he didn't. You can both abridge that and you can't. Get the unabridged version though. Even if it occasionally loses its way, this is still a monumental work that deserves as much time as you can give it.
There's not enough praise in the world for mankind to heap on this project. It's not just great: it's important. By any right, it'd be as important as Joyce's Ulysses. It's not as lyrically experimental or as groundbreaking, probably, but in ambition, in intellect, in every other measure it's the equal of that book. If Joyce's task was trying to dramatize the feeling of being an Irishman at a time when the Empire was crumbling and one had to reconcile oneself to both a brutal past and an uncertain future, to understand what belonging to that kind of polity meant, this book takes the same mission and applies to a world racked by the wars that failing Empire produced. It offers the same diagnostics - a focus on a small set of characters at a particular time in history - but adds in voids of time where the needle of its incredibly detailed, finely recalled personal histories just... skips. Sometimes for five years, as in the entirety of the second World War, and sometimes for longer or just for days. It uses that to explain what happens when nationalism, ideology and the forces of history collide in the smallest of battlefields: a single village. And what happens to a product of that place when she decides to escape.
And it does all of that with singularly masterful prose and a protagonist who thinks in every way like you, the reader, do: circularly, full of trivial concerns that connect themselves to big ones, personal judgments and habits of thought that emerge from the impossible situations she has found herself in and that survive long past their expiration date, weird suspicions she examines, weird suspicions she doesn't. Gesine herself is photorealistic, and if nothing else, you will keep reading for that.
But you'll read it for other reasons, too, because when you locate a character like that in the most momentous period in recent history - the end of the Weimar Republic, the advent of the Third Reich, the fall of the Third Reich, the partition of Germany, and later, the height of the Cold War as the United States conducts a vicious war in Vietnam and comes apart at the seams under Pres. Johnson - you come to really see a time and a place and a people as they were. The power of the technique is remarkable, and Johnson must have realized it, as the project apparently dominated his life for decades, until he died in England with only Gesine for company, in the Eighties.
The dedication, in a word, shows.
The final book has its problems. There are clearly points during which Johnson's focus slipped, and a plot that felt - for all its detours - disciplined in the first volume starts to exhibit lapses that seem less deliberate. Not flubs, exactly: the details are all present and correct. Rather, there are things you'll wish Johnson spent time on that he seems to forget to. There are places he lingers he shouldn't, and places he should go that he doesn't. You get the sense that he could have continued this for another 365 "entries" if he had the time and health, but sadly, he didn't. You can both abridge that and you can't. Get the unabridged version though. Even if it occasionally loses its way, this is still a monumental work that deserves as much time as you can give it.