Welcome to Litsy!

My 3rd from the International #Booker2024 longlist, now on the shortlist. 1980‘s East Berlin. A young woman, 19, falls for a married man, age 53. It starts out somehow romantic before getting darker. What‘s interesting, and what i thought about while listening, was how this relationship reflects the state of the dying GDR. It‘s, if you like, a romantic look at a lost, stifled but stable East Berlin. It makes for interesting read.

Just downloaded this morning. It may the only international booker longlist book i will read on audio. It‘s also the first from the list that I‘ve started. #booker2024

On the Booker long list!
Here‘s the link https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/international/2024

I almost couldn‘t finish this book, I detested Hans so much, Katharine‘s much older lover. At first their relationship seems okay but it turns more toxic by the year, keeping pace with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall. With it, the world opens up to Katharina, who lives in East Berlin, now she just needs to feel she belongs and deserves what the world is offering.

A story of a troubling relationship between a young girl and older man with lasting impacts. I think Erpenbeck is a brilliant writer and loved the structure of this book as told through a series of boxes of documents. Also the parallels between their relationship and the context of East/West Berlin and the Soviet Union when the story takes place are very powerful. Unsettling and moving.

I didn‘t like this book much from the start, as I recoiled from the central 19 yo girl with 53 yo man relationship. Ick. I will say that the setting of 1986 East Germany moving forward through the fall of the Berlin Wall was fascinating and for me saved this from being a pan.

A complex + deep analysis of a relationship btwn a 19 yr old girl + a married man in his 50s which v quickly turns disturbing in the manipulative nature of the control Hans exerts over Katharina. The setting is late 1980s Berlin so the paranoia + brutality echoes the last days of the GDR regime. I felt uncomfortable watching the way K is damaged by an older male but relieved towards the end. A dark troubling read but interesting nevertheless. ⬇️

The tunnels lie hundred fathoms deep under the ground, and it takes several minutes to get from daylight via long escalators to the platforms; then there is pushing and jostling to get in and out, but once in the carriages, people are sitting and standing perfectly calmly in the crush, some of them reading books. Simple people, laborers, office workers, reading. And good books too, not some crap.

(Guardian article from 2014)

... if ever she forgot her keys, then she would while away the time before her mother's return by counting the double-decker buses from the thirteenth- floor corridor window as the buses passed back and forth in front of the Springer publications building, which was something like the citadel of the class enemy.

Did the West as a whole smell like the parcels from her grandmother and aunt: of detergent, gummi bears, and coffee?

The library plastic foiling my photography attempts yet again... 😬😂

He knows all the anecdotes, everyone involved at some time with everyone else, first they were all young, then they had babies together, married, separated, fell in love, became enemies, friends, plotted or practiced withdrawal. Always the same people, at parties, in bars, at openings and premieres. In a small country with no easy exit, everything felt inevitably inbred.

East Berlin late 80s on a rainy day, 19 yr old Katharina meets Hans on the bus. Their eyes lock and everything change. Hans is 34 yrs older, married with one kid.

We see their relationship change over the next yrs, also after the fall of the wall.

This was a very interesting study of a relationship and if anyone has read it, I would love to discuss the second part.

#WeeklyForecast

Finish Northanger Abbey and start Villette with #PemberLittens

I‘ve just started reading the introduction to The Christmas Chronicles, it might seem early for this but Slater starts on 1st November.

Another book I‘ve just started is Kairos and I want to finish that. Read Monstress vol 6. Hopefully start The Garden of the Gods.