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jcampbell's review
challenging
dark
slow-paced
3.25
A mix between incredibly interesting and engaging story aspects and other far less interesting sections.
It's a long book, but the concept and some of the story lines are fantastic, even if it is very obviously written by a man at points.
It's a long book, but the concept and some of the story lines are fantastic, even if it is very obviously written by a man at points.
katjakon's review against another edition
dark
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
winstonsdad_stu's review against another edition
5.0
a look into east Germany and post-cold war Germany using a brothel
an_ja's review against another edition
4.0
Roman über das deutsche Rotlichtmilieu aus der Sicht vieler unterschiedlicher Figuren. Sprachlich teilweise sehr anspruchsvoll, machte deswegen aber auch Spaß zu lesen.
julierasmine's review against another edition
1.0
En elitær og svær bog til den MEGET tålmodige læser.
evelyn261999's review against another edition
2.0
I have found two comments which best describe ‘Bricks and Mortar’: first, the blurb’s claim that it ‘finds inspiration in the films of Russ Meyer, Takashi Miike, Gaspar Noé and David Lynch’. It is disconcerting to start a book by an author about something as gendered as prostitution whose cinematic forebears are all men who have been accused of misogyny and have famously used women’s bodies and, often draw out and even titillating, portrayals of physical/sexual violence against them as lynchpins to create cheap emotional payoffs. Thankfully, this brings us to the second comment: its translator, Katy Derbyshire, writes that ‘this is a book with a lot of bathos’. Despite their puerile and blunt wholes, the rape scenes in, for example, Miike’s ‘Ichi the Killer’, Noé’s ‘Irréversible’ and Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’ were genuinely visceral and upsetting, but I cannot recall feeling anything while reading ‘Bricks and Mortar’, except for mild annoyance at the repetition of the phrase ‘pendulous breasts’ (‘hängenden Brüste’).
Nonetheless, just as I have sometimes found personal and artistic merit in these filmmakers, Meyer sometimes does write well, such as in the final chapter, ‘I’d like to get a horse, one day’, Meyer, with Derbyshire’s astute translation, subtly shows how much advertising has infiltrated the very thoughts of its narrator. Further, there’s a particularly interesting line where a character is looking at some fridge drawers and Meyer writes that they are opened or closed, an incredibly obvious detail which highlights how much everything at once is and is not in this book, where the nonlinear structure and constant shifting of time mean that everything is and was and will be all at once.
Through a feminist lens, this could have absolutely fascinating thematic ramifications about the conception of women as Schrödinger’s whores and what being a whore actually means when women are consistently under immense economic and misogynistic pressure either to actually become prostitutes or their ‘respectable’ equivalents, wives, or both, and to be both punished and rewarded no matter the ‘decision’. In such a reading, the nonlinear aspects might also reflect on the centrality of misogyny to women’s experiences and indeed, the necessity of sexism in the creation of the very category ‘woman’, such that ‘women’ always were, are and will be linked to misogyny. Thus, a commentary on the oldest conception of women as whores.
But for a 600+ page polyvocal book about prostitution, Meyer really doesn’t seem all that interested in the complexity of women’s interiorities at all. Not to unfairly compare everything to Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’, but it is concerning that I have a far better sense of Dolores as a person in a book told exclusively from the perspective of her pedophilic rapist than any one of the women whose inner monologue the reader is actually granted access to. It would have been so interesting to read about the impact of capitalism, an otherwise overarching theme which is often strangely dropped in the women’s sections, and the fall of the Wall on the transwoman in the chapter ‘Transfer (Bye-Bye, My Ladyboy)’, especially when the GDR had far better trans healthcare than its Western counterpart, but instead there’s just a clichéd narrative about her transphobic father and her idolisation of Audrey Hepburn that makes the reader wonder why Meyer even bothered to include it at all.
As with David Lynch’s derivative films (watch Cecelia Condit and Maya Deren), I was often left wondering whether Meyer had lost control of his own narrative in favour of a poor, if recognisable, facsimile of other, better experimental authors, such as Joyce, Döblin, even Céline, a morally reprehensible author whose mordant writing is still preferable to this purportedly ‘neutral’, washed out presentation of an intrinsically political industry. In the end, when asking what Meyer’s use of experimental techniques actually achieves, one can definitively say it does not create a compelling exploration of prostitution around the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Nonetheless, just as I have sometimes found personal and artistic merit in these filmmakers, Meyer sometimes does write well, such as in the final chapter, ‘I’d like to get a horse, one day’, Meyer, with Derbyshire’s astute translation, subtly shows how much advertising has infiltrated the very thoughts of its narrator. Further, there’s a particularly interesting line where a character is looking at some fridge drawers and Meyer writes that they are opened or closed, an incredibly obvious detail which highlights how much everything at once is and is not in this book, where the nonlinear structure and constant shifting of time mean that everything is and was and will be all at once.
Through a feminist lens, this could have absolutely fascinating thematic ramifications about the conception of women as Schrödinger’s whores and what being a whore actually means when women are consistently under immense economic and misogynistic pressure either to actually become prostitutes or their ‘respectable’ equivalents, wives, or both, and to be both punished and rewarded no matter the ‘decision’. In such a reading, the nonlinear aspects might also reflect on the centrality of misogyny to women’s experiences and indeed, the necessity of sexism in the creation of the very category ‘woman’, such that ‘women’ always were, are and will be linked to misogyny. Thus, a commentary on the oldest conception of women as whores.
But for a 600+ page polyvocal book about prostitution, Meyer really doesn’t seem all that interested in the complexity of women’s interiorities at all. Not to unfairly compare everything to Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’, but it is concerning that I have a far better sense of Dolores as a person in a book told exclusively from the perspective of her pedophilic rapist than any one of the women whose inner monologue the reader is actually granted access to. It would have been so interesting to read about the impact of capitalism, an otherwise overarching theme which is often strangely dropped in the women’s sections, and the fall of the Wall on the transwoman in the chapter ‘Transfer (Bye-Bye, My Ladyboy)’, especially when the GDR had far better trans healthcare than its Western counterpart, but instead there’s just a clichéd narrative about her transphobic father and her idolisation of Audrey Hepburn that makes the reader wonder why Meyer even bothered to include it at all.
As with David Lynch’s derivative films (watch Cecelia Condit and Maya Deren), I was often left wondering whether Meyer had lost control of his own narrative in favour of a poor, if recognisable, facsimile of other, better experimental authors, such as Joyce, Döblin, even Céline, a morally reprehensible author whose mordant writing is still preferable to this purportedly ‘neutral’, washed out presentation of an intrinsically political industry. In the end, when asking what Meyer’s use of experimental techniques actually achieves, one can definitively say it does not create a compelling exploration of prostitution around the fall of the Berlin Wall.
amalgamemnon's review against another edition
3.0
This was a hell of a slog - although enjoyable and rewarding for the most part, sometimes my frustrations with it threatened to overwhelm the whole book. The modernist, polyphonic prose is really well done for the most part - it's not just one track, with different chapters and characters having clearly distinct voices and styles. It can be a little frustrating trying to tie the different strands of narrative together, as so often it's unclear what has taken place in just one section of the book. Lots of wavy lines, characters passing in and out of stories or in and out of life. It can be a little unsatisfying to read chapter after chapter of unclear, hazy events that have dreamlike qualities, in part because it's not clear why they would all be like this (at least in Burroughs they're all on drugs all the time; that's not true here). But taken as a whole, it's a very evocative work that you can really feel - it puts you in the midst of this shady, underground world so that you become attuned to its pulse and rhythms.
I think the main problem is that it just goes on too long - it is so hard to keep going without the reward of plot resolution. I think it would be much more satisfying on a second read-through, but at 650 pages I really don't know if I've got the energy to go through it again. Pleased I read it though.
I think the main problem is that it just goes on too long - it is so hard to keep going without the reward of plot resolution. I think it would be much more satisfying on a second read-through, but at 650 pages I really don't know if I've got the energy to go through it again. Pleased I read it though.
arirang's review
3.0
Now longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Award, two years after its longlisting for the 2017 Man Booker International.
The markets and marketplaces are becoming more and more linked, steel and concrete town halls, the meat markets expanding, the bricks and mortar, sticks and stones, the rock growing, in a red-lit circle where everything’s linked, the rubbish truck, the fat woman, the Coke, the Viagras, the blockers, uppers and downers, lost cats, the right to sexual self-determination, scraps of memory like old police badges, the Angels on their motorbikes, peat mosses, flyovers, sixty-six municipal brothels in 1865, trade chronicles, he burrows in the old files, real estate on silver strings leading all the way to Italy, and the fall of the real-estate boss Silvio Lübbke, three bullets, boom, boom, Dead Peepers Alley, houses for pocket money, clues, clues, the country air so clean and pure, soon they’ll be building here but we’ll stop the diggers, the question is, who brings three bodies out to this mire, this swamped puddle, where everyone knows they won’t decompose, when you can dig holes in the sandy ground of the heath or drive out to forest lakes like the ‘Blue Eye’, and there must be anglers there who discover the remotest of lakes, the woods arching around the north-eastern belt of the suburbs and incorporated villages to the south, all of it flat as a pancake.
Clement Meyer's Im Stein has been translated into English by Katy Derbyshire, who in addition to being an accomplished translator has an excellent blog on translation and German literature. The novel's English title Bricks and Mortar is slightly different to the German and Derbyshire explains her choice here: http://blog.fitzcarraldoeditions.com/im-stein-bricks-mortar/. While I am not convinced of her argument, the explanation is helpful and highlights the issues and choices faced by translators.
In the blog love German books she describes this as "the best book I’ve translated, so far", and and as
Derbyshire's reading list to aid the translation also gives a rather good feel for the novel:
The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
Let's Sing Together
The Penguin Rhyming Dictionary
It's all part of the job. Deutsch für die Polizei
A Dictionary of Marxist Thought
Karl Marx: Capital
Alfred Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz
Bobby Cummines: I Am Not a Gangster - Fixer. Armed robber. Hitman. OBE
William T. Vollmann: Whores for Gloria
Rachel Aimee, Eliyanna Kaiser, Audacia Ray (eds.): $pread. The best of the magazine that illuminated the sex industry and started a media revolution
Wolfgang Hilbig, I (trans. Isabel Cole)
David Peace: Tokyo Year Zero
Skip the Games: Escort terms, sex definitions and abbreviations in escort ads
Meyer’s story features multiple perspectives and different voices, told in a non-linear fashion. But Meyer deliberately adds layers of complexity. 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.
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 comparison to Hilbig and Peace is well made but the novel shares many of the flaws of the latter, and doesn’t, for me, approach close to the heights of the latter (see my review of Sleep of the Righteous https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1604328462).
Overall - 3 stars - an average of 5 for the literary merit and the brilliance of the translation and 1 for my personal reading experience.
The markets and marketplaces are becoming more and more linked, steel and concrete town halls, the meat markets expanding, the bricks and mortar, sticks and stones, the rock growing, in a red-lit circle where everything’s linked, the rubbish truck, the fat woman, the Coke, the Viagras, the blockers, uppers and downers, lost cats, the right to sexual self-determination, scraps of memory like old police badges, the Angels on their motorbikes, peat mosses, flyovers, sixty-six municipal brothels in 1865, trade chronicles, he burrows in the old files, real estate on silver strings leading all the way to Italy, and the fall of the real-estate boss Silvio Lübbke, three bullets, boom, boom, Dead Peepers Alley, houses for pocket money, clues, clues, the country air so clean and pure, soon they’ll be building here but we’ll stop the diggers, the question is, who brings three bodies out to this mire, this swamped puddle, where everyone knows they won’t decompose, when you can dig holes in the sandy ground of the heath or drive out to forest lakes like the ‘Blue Eye’, and there must be anglers there who discover the remotest of lakes, the woods arching around the north-eastern belt of the suburbs and incorporated villages to the south, all of it flat as a pancake.
Clement Meyer's Im Stein has been translated into English by Katy Derbyshire, who in addition to being an accomplished translator has an excellent blog on translation and German literature. The novel's English title Bricks and Mortar is slightly different to the German and Derbyshire explains her choice here: http://blog.fitzcarraldoeditions.com/im-stein-bricks-mortar/. While I am not convinced of her argument, the explanation is helpful and highlights the issues and choices faced by translators.
In the blog love German books she describes this as "the best book I’ve translated, so far", and and as
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. Not everybody’s cup of tea.That is a fair summary, including the last sentence as while this perhaps has a shot at the overall prize, it just wasn't to my personal taste.
Derbyshire's reading list to aid the translation also gives a rather good feel for the novel:
The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
Let's Sing Together
The Penguin Rhyming Dictionary
It's all part of the job. Deutsch für die Polizei
A Dictionary of Marxist Thought
Karl Marx: Capital
Alfred Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz
Bobby Cummines: I Am Not a Gangster - Fixer. Armed robber. Hitman. OBE
William T. Vollmann: Whores for Gloria
Rachel Aimee, Eliyanna Kaiser, Audacia Ray (eds.): $pread. The best of the magazine that illuminated the sex industry and started a media revolution
Wolfgang Hilbig, I (trans. Isabel Cole)
David Peace: Tokyo Year Zero
Skip the Games: Escort terms, sex definitions and abbreviations in escort ads
Meyer’s story features multiple perspectives and different voices, told in a non-linear fashion. But Meyer deliberately adds layers of complexity. 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.
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 comparison to Hilbig and Peace is well made but the novel shares many of the flaws of the latter, and doesn’t, for me, approach close to the heights of the latter (see my review of Sleep of the Righteous https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1604328462).
Overall - 3 stars - an average of 5 for the literary merit and the brilliance of the translation and 1 for my personal reading experience.
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