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A review by buddhafish
Dark Satellites by Clemens Meyer
112th book of 2021.
This is an older Fitzcarraldo publication from back in 2020, one I didn't get at the time but as I wait for their new releases I am also backtracking with their products. Their newest, Dark Neighbourhood didn't reach me, lost in the post somehow, and so I settled with the similarly titled, Dark Satellites. Meyer is apparently at the top of the game in contemporary German literary fiction, and this collection proved some serious narrative skill. The stories are all disorientating, disturbing in some way, with ethereal like prose. I've often seen it described as 'impressionistic' and this is a good word for it too. Meyer's stories float around in time with no tags or warning, paragraph to paragraph we are thrown into a character's past, present or future and often the writing is so abstract that we lose the thread of the narrative itself; but reading, we get the impression that this isn't necessarily a problem. Losing ourselves in the narrative feels like part of the experience of the stories, which are all centred around German satellite towns, strangers meeting and becoming friends and then parting. "The Distance", one of the stories identified on the blurb, is about a train-driver who hits a laughing man on the tracks. It then unravels into the narrator's own childhood watching trains go-by, into the present as he searches for the man's wife. I've left it unrated because trying to rate stories like these feels doubly arbitrary; Meyer writes stories that are confusing, boring, unsettling and awe-inspiring all at once. I wouldn't readily recommend this to many people but from a writing point of view alone, it is a masterclass lesson in using time and the short story form.
This is an older Fitzcarraldo publication from back in 2020, one I didn't get at the time but as I wait for their new releases I am also backtracking with their products. Their newest, Dark Neighbourhood didn't reach me, lost in the post somehow, and so I settled with the similarly titled, Dark Satellites. Meyer is apparently at the top of the game in contemporary German literary fiction, and this collection proved some serious narrative skill. The stories are all disorientating, disturbing in some way, with ethereal like prose. I've often seen it described as 'impressionistic' and this is a good word for it too. Meyer's stories float around in time with no tags or warning, paragraph to paragraph we are thrown into a character's past, present or future and often the writing is so abstract that we lose the thread of the narrative itself; but reading, we get the impression that this isn't necessarily a problem. Losing ourselves in the narrative feels like part of the experience of the stories, which are all centred around German satellite towns, strangers meeting and becoming friends and then parting. "The Distance", one of the stories identified on the blurb, is about a train-driver who hits a laughing man on the tracks. It then unravels into the narrator's own childhood watching trains go-by, into the present as he searches for the man's wife. I've left it unrated because trying to rate stories like these feels doubly arbitrary; Meyer writes stories that are confusing, boring, unsettling and awe-inspiring all at once. I wouldn't readily recommend this to many people but from a writing point of view alone, it is a masterclass lesson in using time and the short story form.