Wolfgang Hilbig
I’ve got a problem with best-book-of-the-year lists. I can’t really articulate what that problem is – they’re egotistical? it’s not the end of the year yet? I’m doubtful anybody cares? that they seem to somehow dovetail into the frenzy of Christmas? Whatever it is, they fill me with a general discomfort. So in compiling my list I thought: why not give that discomfort an even deeper skewering? Listed below are the books that are my most memorable from the year. Incidentally, they’d all likely make my best books list anyway (with a few others: Pond by Claire Louise-Bennett comes to mind, Hotel Andromeda by Gabriel Josipovici, Cassandra by Christa Wolf etc.), so maybe I’m sort of cheating.
On, then, to memorability: I read the sequels to The Notebook by Ãgota Kristóf this year and think about them often enough. About how Kristóf totally upended the first and how brave I thought that was, but mainly about how shocked I was by the difference in tone and narrative style. So why aren’t they on the list? I wish I hadn’t read them at all. That’s not why they’re not on the list, but I hope it goes some way in explaining why the books below are. Wishing I hadn’t read them is a personal response, and Kristóf’s books are memorable, but their memorability is not, in this instance, linked to the personal; their prominence in their intersection with my life is negligible. When it comes to these lists I find myself more interested in reasons why. Reading, it hardly needs to be said, is a personal act. Maybe, ironically, most of these best books lists strike me as impersonal. Here are the books that have stayed with me – and, maybe, why.
The novels I feel compelled to review are often the novels I feel stuck or lost in the middle of – the writing is my way out. Such was the case with ‘I’ by Wolfgang Hilbig, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole and published this year in typically stylish fashion by Seagull Books as part of their German List. Though it seems to be drawing nearer, I can’t fathom the state as depicted by Hilbig, a state based on his experiences in East Germany; of not only having suspicions of being watched and followed but of knowing I’m being watched and followed. ‘I’ is a paranoid narrative that uses formal experimentation to loop that paranoia around itself.
I read The Magic Mountain at a time that I was experiencing bad health or grief or anxiety – exactly which I’m still not completely sure. My time in the sanatorium with Hans and Joachim at times exacerbated it, at other times relieved it. I probably shouldn’t have read the book at that particular timing – I felt like I’d be stuck on the mountain forever. Finishing, and leaving behind Hans Castorp, was like losing a friend. Godspeed, dear Hans.
Ivan Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys (Portobello Books)
My interview with Ivan Vladislavic for 3:AM was a selfish act. I read Double Negative a couple of years ago, thought it was exceptional, promised myself I’d find and read more of his writing, then got distracted by other things. The pitch to interview him, then, would, if he agreed, both give me the shove I needed to read as much of his work as I could find, and to ask him some questions about it. As I read his books, it seemed to me the world of his work grew, expanding wider and wider with each text. Apart from Double Negative, my favourite is Portrait with Keys, the story of Vladislavić’s Johannesburg. Fragments of life at the local scale work to build up a picture of Ivan’s home city, mapping out the demands it puts on its inhabitants and the conflicted relationship he has with it.
Rohini Mohan, The Seasons of Trouble (Verso Books)
I brought the new year in with The Seasons of Trouble by Rohini Mohan. Many words have been read since, but Mohan’s Seasons, on the Sri Lankan civil war, was an indelible reading experience, made all the more profound due to the fact that the conflict continues to affect the Sri Lankan people and produce Tamil refugees, some of which look to my country as a place of asylum. This has directly influenced immigration policy in the country, and, by extension, the region – a policy which has been denounced internationally for its treatment of these so-called boat people. Like Vladislavić, Mohan examines the small to understand the grand – her journalistic impulses ensures that she brings the reader in close while remaining at a distance herself.
— Tristan Foster is a senior editor at 3:AM.
