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A review by arirang
Bricks and Mortar by Katy Derbyshire, Clemens Meyer
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.