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lizzysiddal's review against another edition
4.0
Bloomin’ marvellous!
Full review at:
https://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2020/02/20/dark-satellites-clemens-meyer-fitzcarraldofortnightz/
Full review at:
https://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2020/02/20/dark-satellites-clemens-meyer-fitzcarraldofortnightz/
sazbealing's review against another edition
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
drifterontherun's review against another edition
4.0
I must confess — I do judge books by the cover. I don't see how you can't, really. A cover can tell you so much about a book.
You know exactly what you're getting if the cover shows a shirtless man, the head of the woman in his arms thrown back in seeming ecstasy.
Italians refer to mystery novels as I libri gialli (yellow books) because mysteries there have long been identified by their yellow covers and spines.
When I learned via an article in the New Yorker some years back that Peter Mendelsund, a professional cover artist, was designing a series of covers for new editions of several Italo Calvino classics, I just had to have them, despite the fact that I had many of the same titles already.
I just love a book with a good cover.
Which brings me to the UK publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. There is no cover art for the books they release. Non-fiction books receive an all white cover, while novels and short story collections receive an all blue cover.
I absolutely love this, not just because deep, solid blue and solid off white make for lovely covers, but because they reveal nothing about the story. I don't know what I'm getting into when I get a book in the mail from Fitzcarraldo Editions and that sense of the unexpected, especially in a day and age when surprises are so few and far between, is something I revel in.
The only thing left to decipher then, without opening the book or reading the jacket, is the title — the other thing I unapologetically judge books by.
"Dark Satellites" is a somewhat cryptic title in itself. Is it referring to satellites that orbit the earth? To satellite cities?
Most, if not all, of these stories take place in post-USSR East Germany. The exact setting of these stories is never disclosed, or if they were, I certainly missed it.
"Dark Satellites" is riven with echoes of other authors. The way the author, Clemens Meyer, plays with memory couldn't help but evoke W.G. Sebald, and certain stories, particularly "The Beach Railway's Last Run" brought to my mind the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig.
A sort of languid melancholy pervades many of these stories, several of which feature or take place in dilapidated Soviet-style apartment buildings. I saw nothing bright when visualizing these settings and characters, no greens or yellows, no light blues. Instead, the entire collection is muted, set in somber, dark tones of concrete and eternally overcast skies.
The great Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski would be my choice to helm an adaptation of this collection. His unforgettable series of ten films based on the Ten Commandments, each an hour long, each set in the same Warsaw apartment building, each drained of color, felt closely related to many of the stories in this collection.
Here Meyer has turned his eye to the new Germany, and the present does not appear bright. Meyer's stories feature characters who are all stuck in the past, who are all — old and young alike — living at the end of their days. The future doesn't exist and the present is as cloudy and unclear as the East German sky on a winter's day.
All these characters have is the past. They live on the outskirts of life, in their "Dark Satellites," slowly orbiting around strangers who, without warning, spark some memory inside of them. They don't feel. They just sometimes remember what it had been like to feel.
All of these stories made me feel. Some more than others. The title story was my favorite of the collection, a man's memory of a love affair with the wife of his conservative Muslim neighbor. The aforementioned "The Beach Railway's Last Run" was another favorite. That story, set in the waning days of World War II, felt like it was set somewhere else, in a part of Germany the darkness had not yet reached.
In "The Distance," a train driver hits a man on the tracks and he's sent backwards, as all the characters in these stories are, to wonder about the life of the man he struck, and in the process examines his own.
Trains run through many of these stories, a potent contrast to characters who don't feel like they're going anywhere. They're well aware that Germany has changed, that it's changing still, but they're immobile all the same.
They're stuck in a permanent state of present uncertainty, while their minds are turned to the romanticized past.
You know exactly what you're getting if the cover shows a shirtless man, the head of the woman in his arms thrown back in seeming ecstasy.
Italians refer to mystery novels as I libri gialli (yellow books) because mysteries there have long been identified by their yellow covers and spines.
When I learned via an article in the New Yorker some years back that Peter Mendelsund, a professional cover artist, was designing a series of covers for new editions of several Italo Calvino classics, I just had to have them, despite the fact that I had many of the same titles already.
I just love a book with a good cover.
Which brings me to the UK publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. There is no cover art for the books they release. Non-fiction books receive an all white cover, while novels and short story collections receive an all blue cover.
I absolutely love this, not just because deep, solid blue and solid off white make for lovely covers, but because they reveal nothing about the story. I don't know what I'm getting into when I get a book in the mail from Fitzcarraldo Editions and that sense of the unexpected, especially in a day and age when surprises are so few and far between, is something I revel in.
The only thing left to decipher then, without opening the book or reading the jacket, is the title — the other thing I unapologetically judge books by.
"Dark Satellites" is a somewhat cryptic title in itself. Is it referring to satellites that orbit the earth? To satellite cities?
Most, if not all, of these stories take place in post-USSR East Germany. The exact setting of these stories is never disclosed, or if they were, I certainly missed it.
"Dark Satellites" is riven with echoes of other authors. The way the author, Clemens Meyer, plays with memory couldn't help but evoke W.G. Sebald, and certain stories, particularly "The Beach Railway's Last Run" brought to my mind the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig.
A sort of languid melancholy pervades many of these stories, several of which feature or take place in dilapidated Soviet-style apartment buildings. I saw nothing bright when visualizing these settings and characters, no greens or yellows, no light blues. Instead, the entire collection is muted, set in somber, dark tones of concrete and eternally overcast skies.
The great Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski would be my choice to helm an adaptation of this collection. His unforgettable series of ten films based on the Ten Commandments, each an hour long, each set in the same Warsaw apartment building, each drained of color, felt closely related to many of the stories in this collection.
Here Meyer has turned his eye to the new Germany, and the present does not appear bright. Meyer's stories feature characters who are all stuck in the past, who are all — old and young alike — living at the end of their days. The future doesn't exist and the present is as cloudy and unclear as the East German sky on a winter's day.
All these characters have is the past. They live on the outskirts of life, in their "Dark Satellites," slowly orbiting around strangers who, without warning, spark some memory inside of them. They don't feel. They just sometimes remember what it had been like to feel.
All of these stories made me feel. Some more than others. The title story was my favorite of the collection, a man's memory of a love affair with the wife of his conservative Muslim neighbor. The aforementioned "The Beach Railway's Last Run" was another favorite. That story, set in the waning days of World War II, felt like it was set somewhere else, in a part of Germany the darkness had not yet reached.
In "The Distance," a train driver hits a man on the tracks and he's sent backwards, as all the characters in these stories are, to wonder about the life of the man he struck, and in the process examines his own.
Trains run through many of these stories, a potent contrast to characters who don't feel like they're going anywhere. They're well aware that Germany has changed, that it's changing still, but they're immobile all the same.
They're stuck in a permanent state of present uncertainty, while their minds are turned to the romanticized past.
milos_booknook's review against another edition
dark
emotional
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.5
Stream of pompousness
Stories that I actually liked:
Stories that I actually liked:
💙 The Beach Railway’s Last Run
💙 The Crack
I admire the writing and the translation. The time/perspective shifting is well done. But when every single story features this element, you get a bit fed up. Like, we get it, you’re really good at conceptualizing time in prose.
mccordian's review against another edition
4.0
The evolution of a moment and the miles between chance encounters in the stylings of an intentionally skip-riddled record. When others jazzercise through "...to B" Meyer sits and meditates on "From A...". Peak bleak! Short on time? Read "The Crack" then reconsider your schedule.
gaaaandaaaalf's review
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
3.5
gremily's review
5.0
Surprisingly, this is my book-of-the-year so far. Who could have guessed? I like short stories but tend to tire of single-author collections, yet this was a book I found myself picking up again and again gladly. Each story started a little dully, and I mentally ruled it out as “probably boring” before being swept up in it, strangely affected, and deposited on the other side feeling as though I’d had my eyes opened, but to what exactly I wasn’t sure.
Meyer writes in a narrative voice that felt totally new and distinctive to me. Protagonists are largely vaguely anonymous working class men in the days after (but how many days after?) German reunification. Refugees from many places and from many wars move through these stories, some in the past, some in the present, many nameless. Time is not so much hazy as deliberately slippery, with each story sliding back and forth between past, present and future, and some of which don’t seem to be real.
It sounds unreadable, but the stories are simple, and I found a kind of dark magic in the writing style that drew me in. I can understand that what worked spectacularly for me about this collection could completely alienate someone else. But for me it set off that kind of sparkly, incantatory effect that you can never predict but which is probably the reason I read.
Meyer writes in a narrative voice that felt totally new and distinctive to me. Protagonists are largely vaguely anonymous working class men in the days after (but how many days after?) German reunification. Refugees from many places and from many wars move through these stories, some in the past, some in the present, many nameless. Time is not so much hazy as deliberately slippery, with each story sliding back and forth between past, present and future, and some of which don’t seem to be real.
It sounds unreadable, but the stories are simple, and I found a kind of dark magic in the writing style that drew me in. I can understand that what worked spectacularly for me about this collection could completely alienate someone else. But for me it set off that kind of sparkly, incantatory effect that you can never predict but which is probably the reason I read.
arirang's review
2.0
The night before last – so yesterday, no, the day before? – she was a little confused because the days and nights were flowing together more and more
Bricks and Mortar, translated by Katy Derbyshire from Clemens Meyer’s German-language original, featured on the longlist of both major translated-into-English fiction awards: the 2017 UK Man Booker International and the 2019 US Best Translated Book Award.
The translator herself described it as her favourite translation to date and a a playful, ambitious, neo-modernist, Marxism-tinged exploration of the development of the east German prostitution market, from next to nothing in 1989 to full decriminalization and diversification in the present day. but adding Not everybody’s cup of tea., and unfortunately the brew wasn’t to my taste. I admired the literary ambition and the translation but didn’t enjoy the reading experience. From my review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1942358813):
The stories are presented in three groups, each with a brief mood-setting piece of 2 pages, followed by 3 more substantive (15-30 pages) stories. The characters and settings of each are distinct, but share a common focus on the marginalized, typically living in the dark, satellite towns of the title, in the former East Germany: a security guard on night patrol near to a refugee centre, a train cleaner who befriends a hairdresser at the station where they both work (Granta reproduced this story https://granta.com/late-arrival/), the owner of a small burger bar, a freight train driver.
There is a flavour of Wolfgang Hilbig to the settings - the following passage could have come straight from the Tidings of The Trees/Old Rendering Plant/The Females novellas:
An old man sitting on a park bench told us about the open-cast mines in the lowlands around the town, gigantic craters where once excavators ate away at the brown coal like lindworms.
Unfortunately though I just, again, didn't connect with this - and indeed it rather suffers from the comparison to Hilbig.
The shorter length makes for a different reading experience to Bricks and Mortar and, dare I say, a book that is less formally ambitious. But the shifting sense of time is a common and distinctive feature, with the characters themselves often confused about reality versus memory (the present is nothing says the narrator of the title story). This sense starts with the first lines of the first story, ‘Broken Glass in Unit 95’:
The nights were dull and endless, started at six and ended at six, they were like dark days that touched in the middle, and when they stopped being dull they got even darker and more endless and we wished we were bored again, hours half-asleep between our inspection rounds, our heads never allowed to touch the table top, we’d doze sitting up, but Unit 95 had become unpredictable and some of us had got unpredictable too and lost our nerve and got taken off the job, but I tried to stay calm, I knew the new part of town, the satellite town where Unit 95 was, I knew the nights when people went crazy, I’d been working in Unit 95, been doing my rounds all over town since the mid-nineties, I knew the hostels the other guys sometimes called ‘roach motels’, where the asylum-seekers lived, no one had ever liked working shifts there, and now it was all getting even worse.
…
I started my round without the dog, like I always did. It was still almost light and the dog had hip problems like most of the work dogs, he was an old Belgian Shepherd, well trained but with a slight limp, the onset of HD, hip dysplasia, and I didn’t take him on my round until after midnight. He stayed in the security cabin until then and rested. Our cabin was right next to the road on a grass verge and the light was on from six till six – you couldn’t turn it off – so everyone could see us. A security guy and a dog in a glowing Plexiglas cabin, and outside, the night.
‘One to Twelve, One to Twelve, come in, over.’ I unclipped the radio from my belt. It was heavy and much too large and a better weapon than the rubber baton I also wore on my belt. The radio was a relic from another era, we had mobiles and smartphones and all that crap, but the radio sent out beeps and white noise in the frequencies of the night, it spoke to us through time and space as I saw her again that night in Unit 95.
But it wasn’t her. How could it be her, unchanged and so young, after more than twenty years?
‘Twelve, go ahead.’
I started my first round without the dog. It was autumn. I touched the first magnetic tag against my guard patrol reader. A low beep. I put the black device back into the side pocket of my uniform jacket; it looked like an electric shocker. The walkie-talkie crackled and began to speak, and I heard the voice of the old dispatcher back at base, far away from the satellite town, on the western edge of the town proper, out of which the satellite town grew like... days that... I shook my head, too many rounds, too many shifts over the past few weeks.
The final story is something of an outlier, being based on the real-life German communist and writer Willi Bredel (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willi_Bredel) an his contemporaries such as Johannes Becher and Alfred Kurella, who all escaped Nazi Germany for the Soviet Union and later returned to senior positions in the DDR, and the tale is combined with the legendary 14th century privateer Klaus Störtebeker. I wasn't entirely sure of the connection, but I think Meyer's point is to have them look forward to creating a new, Communist Germany, with a flash forward at the end to the grim reality of what this country was to become - back to the dark satellites and lignite mines.
There's just something about Meyer's writing that doesn't click for me. I can admire it, and it has many similarities to authors I love (notably an explicit influence from Hilbig) but I find the writing something of a slog: it's a worrying side when one looks forward to see how much more there is to go in a 20 page story.
2.5 stars - but I would still recommend it to others.
Bricks and Mortar, translated by Katy Derbyshire from Clemens Meyer’s German-language original, featured on the longlist of both major translated-into-English fiction awards: the 2017 UK Man Booker International and the 2019 US Best Translated Book Award.
The translator herself described it as her favourite translation to date and a a playful, ambitious, neo-modernist, Marxism-tinged exploration of the development of the east German prostitution market, from next to nothing in 1989 to full decriminalization and diversification in the present day. but adding Not everybody’s cup of tea., and unfortunately the brew wasn’t to my taste. I admired the literary ambition and the translation but didn’t enjoy the reading experience. From my review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1942358813):
We’re not always clear who the narrator is and even within a given narrative points of view and times shift. Characters “reminisce” about the future (later someone got shot there, but I had nothing to do with that. I can't know about that yet.) and drop seamlessly into the past, we’re often clear if the events described are happening or imagined, even at time if the characters are alive or dead, or indeed dead but now alive again.Dark Satellites is a short-story collection from the same author/translator/publisher (another of Fitzcarraldo Editions’s wonderful blue books) combination, from the 2017 original Die stillen Trabanten.
The issue I has is that there are two ways to read this type of book. Either read it very carefully, cross-referencing back to piece together the story, or let the polyphonic voices wash over you. The problem either way the book is 400+ pages too long – my interest level was waning after 200 pages.
The stories are presented in three groups, each with a brief mood-setting piece of 2 pages, followed by 3 more substantive (15-30 pages) stories. The characters and settings of each are distinct, but share a common focus on the marginalized, typically living in the dark, satellite towns of the title, in the former East Germany: a security guard on night patrol near to a refugee centre, a train cleaner who befriends a hairdresser at the station where they both work (Granta reproduced this story https://granta.com/late-arrival/), the owner of a small burger bar, a freight train driver.
There is a flavour of Wolfgang Hilbig to the settings - the following passage could have come straight from the Tidings of The Trees/Old Rendering Plant/The Females novellas:
An old man sitting on a park bench told us about the open-cast mines in the lowlands around the town, gigantic craters where once excavators ate away at the brown coal like lindworms.
Unfortunately though I just, again, didn't connect with this - and indeed it rather suffers from the comparison to Hilbig.
The shorter length makes for a different reading experience to Bricks and Mortar and, dare I say, a book that is less formally ambitious. But the shifting sense of time is a common and distinctive feature, with the characters themselves often confused about reality versus memory (the present is nothing says the narrator of the title story). This sense starts with the first lines of the first story, ‘Broken Glass in Unit 95’:
The nights were dull and endless, started at six and ended at six, they were like dark days that touched in the middle, and when they stopped being dull they got even darker and more endless and we wished we were bored again, hours half-asleep between our inspection rounds, our heads never allowed to touch the table top, we’d doze sitting up, but Unit 95 had become unpredictable and some of us had got unpredictable too and lost our nerve and got taken off the job, but I tried to stay calm, I knew the new part of town, the satellite town where Unit 95 was, I knew the nights when people went crazy, I’d been working in Unit 95, been doing my rounds all over town since the mid-nineties, I knew the hostels the other guys sometimes called ‘roach motels’, where the asylum-seekers lived, no one had ever liked working shifts there, and now it was all getting even worse.
…
I started my round without the dog, like I always did. It was still almost light and the dog had hip problems like most of the work dogs, he was an old Belgian Shepherd, well trained but with a slight limp, the onset of HD, hip dysplasia, and I didn’t take him on my round until after midnight. He stayed in the security cabin until then and rested. Our cabin was right next to the road on a grass verge and the light was on from six till six – you couldn’t turn it off – so everyone could see us. A security guy and a dog in a glowing Plexiglas cabin, and outside, the night.
‘One to Twelve, One to Twelve, come in, over.’ I unclipped the radio from my belt. It was heavy and much too large and a better weapon than the rubber baton I also wore on my belt. The radio was a relic from another era, we had mobiles and smartphones and all that crap, but the radio sent out beeps and white noise in the frequencies of the night, it spoke to us through time and space as I saw her again that night in Unit 95.
But it wasn’t her. How could it be her, unchanged and so young, after more than twenty years?
‘Twelve, go ahead.’
I started my first round without the dog. It was autumn. I touched the first magnetic tag against my guard patrol reader. A low beep. I put the black device back into the side pocket of my uniform jacket; it looked like an electric shocker. The walkie-talkie crackled and began to speak, and I heard the voice of the old dispatcher back at base, far away from the satellite town, on the western edge of the town proper, out of which the satellite town grew like... days that... I shook my head, too many rounds, too many shifts over the past few weeks.
The final story is something of an outlier, being based on the real-life German communist and writer Willi Bredel (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willi_Bredel) an his contemporaries such as Johannes Becher and Alfred Kurella, who all escaped Nazi Germany for the Soviet Union and later returned to senior positions in the DDR, and the tale is combined with the legendary 14th century privateer Klaus Störtebeker. I wasn't entirely sure of the connection, but I think Meyer's point is to have them look forward to creating a new, Communist Germany, with a flash forward at the end to the grim reality of what this country was to become - back to the dark satellites and lignite mines.
There's just something about Meyer's writing that doesn't click for me. I can admire it, and it has many similarities to authors I love (notably an explicit influence from Hilbig) but I find the writing something of a slog: it's a worrying side when one looks forward to see how much more there is to go in a 20 page story.
2.5 stars - but I would still recommend it to others.
abbie_'s review
dark
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
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