I am one of the few people on the planet to have read Uwe Johnson's monumental Anniversaries, (at least I think I have read it all; it's possible I someone managed to skip one, presumably short section) whether in the recent complete English translation or in the original German. But is it any good? Should you put aside a year (because that's the natural length of time it will take to read to it) to plough your way through it?
Johnson sprang to fame in 1962 when he won the the Prix International for Mutmassungen über Jakob, "Speculations about Jakob". (Jakob is a character in Anniversaries, although this is no Tristam Shandy and we do get in 1600 pages the consolation of learning the exact details of his begetting of Marie, one of the two major characters in the novel , the other being her mother, Gesine.). The significance of that, of course, is that in the previous year the prize was famously awarded jointly awarded to Samuel Beckett for "The Trilogy" and to Jorge Luis Borges for Ficciones. Beckett was already well-know but the publicity owing to the award to Borges quickly led to the formation of an intense global cult around the writer and his works that very much continues to this day. So Johnson, at just 28, was following in some pretty august footsteps. Nabokov complained that he was disappointed that all there ultimately was to Borges was a few short stories and though Beckett wrote several novels, he is best known for short works. Not so Johnson. Anniversaries is colossal. A section a day every day for a year (that's a leap year, 1968) plus a prelude section and an appendix to the second book of the tetralogy containing some reminiscences of one of the characters. The whole thing weighs in at nearly 1700 pages. But is it actually any good?
The translation is workman-like enough. There's the occasional nod, but that's inevitable in such a lengthy work and there are certain stylistic decision I'd have called differently Station Street in Jerichow, for instance, should, surely, be Bahnhofstrasse. Now, Jerichow is a fictional place and I suppose it's possible that the street names in its real model were in Plattdeutsch and Johnson translated them into standard (High) German. Is there any internal (or external) evidence for that? Certainly, Luftwaffe could be left as Luftwaffe with fear of confusion as could the names of newspapers. All of the units could have been left as they are in the original text even if that might discombobulate people unable to think at all in kilometres or kilograms. (There is a German inch, but I think it might be exactly 2.5 cm and a French pound, la livre, 500 grams, but I don't know if they have that in Germany. "Aujourd'hui, le terme Pfund est toujours d'usage courant et réfère de manière universelle à la livre de 500 grammes." If you say so, French FoAK. Also, of course, how much is the term actually used in practice today or in the 1930s-1980s.) But, of course, you are always going to lose a great deal in a translation. Johnson might be a master of German prose, but one is never going to know that.
And thereby, I think, lies the major problem with the book. If you compare to other big, "hard" books in English that one might reasonably compare it to, Tristam Shandy or Moby Dick or Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon was born in 1937) or Infinite Jest, one can't read one's way into the book in the same way because there's always the gap of the language there. But, of course, it's not just the language. Johnson was born in 1934. He died in 1984. (So, unlike both Beckett and Borges, he didn't make into his late 80s.) He lived in New York for several years in the 1960s, where much of Anniversaries is set and, although the book is certainly in some ways a New York novel, it's really and increasingly a Germany novel. Part of this can be ascribed to the long gestation period of the fourth book of the novel (it's definitely a single novel and not really a tetralogy except largely in terms of publishing schedule and convenience). Johnson left New York and went to live in Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey, where, doubtless, the eternal, grey vistas of the Thames estuary from the upper stories of his house reminded him of his beloved boyhood Baltic. Johnson liked reading newspapers and many sections of Anniversaries begin with extended quotes from that day's New York Times. But, in provincial Kent, 1967-8 copies of the New York Times were hard to come by. We get a lot more of Gesine's life in the immediate post-war Soviet Zone and a lot less of New York. It's perhaps no surprise that the fourth volume took more than a decade to appear after the third. But here's the thing. Johnson might have the last decade of his life in England and died there (there are even early passages of Anniversaries set, perhaps improbably, in Richmond where Gesine's father works as a carpenter in the early 1930s; does Patrick Wright point to a family connection of Johnson's for that, I wonder, in his book on him?) and Gesine lives in New York (in the same apartment as Johnson did in our reality), but it's a very German novel. I have no idea what to compare it to. Johnson is, despite his American and British connections, a very middle-century, Mitteleuropa writer. Who is like? Heinrich Böll? Günter Grass? W.G. Sebald? What classic German writers is he channelling? Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain? I know almost nothing about German literature. Johnson was drenched in it. And German culture. Gesine isn't the exact same age as Johnson (and she's a woman) and her family history is definitely different, but obviously aspect of her life match Johnson's. But also, I suspect, isn't very possible that a lot of the things that happen to Gesine at high school and the people she knows are based on stories that Johnson knew from his life in East Germany, from other people he met or things he read. People who lived in East Germany (or even perhaps in West too) might smile wryly in recognition of the things that go in post-war Jerichow and Gneez.
Now, we might say that Johnson liked hanging out in the pub in Sheerness. He must have been a fun guy, at least at some level. But Anniversaries isn't really a fun or engaging book. It is not like Gravity's Rainbow, a book one says to oneself on reading, why didn't I read this book decades ago? Nothing really happens. OK, there's a vague sort of kidnap section at one point early on and perhaps there's some deep significance to that that perhaps fits in with what happens in Finland right at the end of the book, but if there is it's lost on me. Certainly, one learns a great deal about everyday life in rural eastern Germany from the early 1930s to the early 1950s (and, yes, in New York in 1967-8), but it is not generally very thrilling, viscerally or psychologically. I suspect I am missing an awful lot, probably if you are a Germanophone it's full of guffaws and the pleasure of recognition. Gesine never makes it to Sheerness, although she presumably does to Czechoslovakia. Well, indeed. Johnson was clearly very exercised by the Prague Spring, which in the early 1970s was certainly very salient. Gesine is, to my view, a very passive and cypher-like character (but I am not sure she is supposed to be). She works in a bank and is pressurised into taking on a special assignment to Czechoslovakia for the sinister vice-president (and éminence grise) of the bank This again makes it sound more exciting than tr actually is, especially as it drawn out over a thousand pages or more. The novel (spoilers, I guess) ends with Gesine and her daughter, Marie, about to arrive in Czechoslovakia on... 21 August 1968. The day of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Again, this is obviously supposed to be significant. Her mission is now going to come to naught as the Czechoslovakians aren't going to be in the market for Western loans for a while anymore (I seem to recall this is discussed in various of the NYT extracts so it was obviously a thing at the time). Is the implication that Gesine is going to die in Czechoslovakia? I don't know. I don't think so. Why should she? Sure, it's a bad time to arrive, but she's a US citizen by this point, I am pretty sure, so unless there's something I am missing she will eventually get out. Perhaps Patrick Wright's book gives some clues. But that's apparently 700 pages long, which, I suppose, appropriate. I do have a copy.
There's the occasional little post-modern gesture, but it's not really that kind of book. It is, as I have suggested, a book for people from the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century. It's 2022 now and I am don't have the knowledge of and emotional investment in the milieu that Johnson had an a German intellectual of the late C20th. Beckett and, for me, Borges may abide, but though I can say I am glad I read it, it will give me bragging rights in certain circles, I can't say I enjoyed it in the way I enjoyed other big books. But I am open to persuasion as to what I might have missed.
Edvard Munch, In the Tavern, 1890 via https://www.berfrois.com/2022/12/justin-e-h-smith-hell-yes-life-is-good/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email. That's pretty much how I feel and look all the time these days. But he's only 50 (and has already given up the sauce) and gets
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