Get Your Hands On Anniversaries, Volume 1: From A Year In The Life Of Gesine Cresspahl, August 1967–April 1968 Articulated By Uwe Johnson Available As Textbook

James Joyce for me, Billy Joels “We Didnt Start the Fire” writ long, Interesting, but headache inducing. I dont think you can read the whole thing if it doesnt have something for you, firstpages showed some real promise, the followingcompletely lost any, new york times fan fic disguised as a novel i can't believe i will subject myself to anotherpages as per my never a quit a book no matter how long rule.
I don't like leaving project reads like these unfinished, but from where I stand, the rewards simply don't justify the investment needed.
The prospect of another eight hundred pages of Johnson's oblique cultural meanderings simply doesn't excite me like it did in August of last year.


I finished Volume One of Anniversaries about a week after the chronological date with which the author ends it, after nearly eight months of daily readings with the occasion deviations from the it's dated sequence.
In that time, I can to regard Johnson's narrators the titular Gesine Cresspahl, her daughter Marie, and her father Heinrich as distant acquaintances rather than close friends.
Given the remarkable latitude he's given himself to explore their lives, Johnson seems surprisingly disinterested in exploring their interiority, and would rather examine the culture of two juxtaposed eras the forties and the sixties.


Now you may read that and recognise the makings of a systems novel, and at first glance, I would agree with you.
But I simply found that neither of his projects the psychological profile and the cultural postmortem are delivered in an engaging way.
His command of perspective is deliberately fractured and unstable, resulting in an unclear position as to what he actually thinks about the world he's cataloguing.
The use of an ever shifting narratorial perspective is an interesting formal experiment, sure, but never allowed me to feel like I truly got inside the mind of any single character.
The entire time I felt very distinctly like an outsider looking in, . .

and maybe that's the point, Perhaps alienation was the intended position for his audience and reflects what he felt as a man of the postwar era himself I'm in no position to confirm this.
But as one of those readers, I spent over eight hundred pages looking for an entry point I never found.
While there were remarkable passages and moments of cleareyed, elevated prose, I'm going to hold off on finishing Volume Two of Anniversaries until such a time as I've knock off more a few more of my more immediate TBRs.
Maybe that'll be by the end of this year, maybe next, maybe never,

To those who stuck along with me for the serialised group read, I enjoyed your company and conversation, and hope you got more out of it than I did.
If you finish it and think the second volume may be more engaging than the first, drop me a line.
I'd love to hear from you, Okay, Calling it quits here, At least for the foreseeable future, I just don't think I will gain much by finishing this, And here is a good stopping place,

My rambling thoughts when I was debating whether to continue or not:
The concept is interesting.
It painstakingly depicts the time/with its descriptions of New York City, the news and politics, a German womans family history and the postwar guilt that goes along with it, and countless other things.
There are nice moments of great human compassion, and sometimes lovely passages and truths about human nature,

However, I dont quite see this as the most important German novel of the postwar period that some have claimed it to be.
I admit that it has great value in historical terms, particularly with the insight into the events of this time as they happened.
Im also not denying its literary merit, But there are times that I found the structure or certain devices uneven, if not lazy, It often falls flat and is extremely tedious in some sections, Or, for example, certain quirks become grating after theth gd time, such as the personification of The New York Times as some kind of Auntie a barely perceptible chuckle the first time, a I swear Im going to throw this book out the window if he does it one more time tirade on theth.


There are plenty of big books that are great, But I see a tendency to give more credit and leeway to a book just because it is big and ambitious bonus points if its a white maleit is often the big book that is automatically dubbed an authors magnum opus, despite the term meaning a great work.
Of course there are countless reasons and theories behind this is it another symptom of our fastpaced, shortattentionspan society Or just some kind of Stockholm Syndrome that takes over when we find ourselves in the middle of a tome with no end in sight Hey, Justine, did you stop and think that this is just you getting disgruntled over hype culture.
again Excellent point, I shall take that under consideration,

Ive digressed.

Im in a mood. This is relatively unimportant. But voilà, some semblance of thoughts so far and, after looking over what I just wrote, maybe a sign that I should not continue.
We shall see. Volume one of two chunky books following a year in the life of a German woman and her tenyearold daughter living in New York in thes.
Not much happens in their lives in this time but alongside that story we have the American news as reported in the New York Times, and in another timeline we are slowly told the story of Gesine's parents and her own childhood in Nazi Germany.


This is long and slow, and if I hadn't been in a group reading the two volumes over a year, I might have given up.
It's definitely not something I could read quickly, butpages a week works and gives me a few weeks off.
I'm not finding the mother and daughter particularly engaging, but a lot is starting to happen in the news in, and the thread set in prewar and wartime Germany has a lot of emotional power.
Uwe Johnson was a German writer, editor, and scholar, Johnson was born in Kammin in Pomerania now Kamień Pomorski, Poland, His father was a Swedish descent peasant from Mecklenburg and his mother was from Pommern, At the end of World War II in, he fled with his family to Anklam West Pomerania his father died in a Soviet internment camp Fünfeichen.
The family eventually settled in Güstrow, where he attended John Brinckman Oberschule, He went on to study German philology, first in Rostock, then in Leipzig, His Diplomarbeit final thesis was on Ernst Barlach, Due to his lack of political support for the Communist regime of East Germany, he was suspended from the University onJunebut was later Uwe Johnson was a German writer, editor, and scholar.
Johnson was born in Kammin in Pomerania now Kamień Pomorski, Poland, His father was a Swedish descent peasant from Mecklenburg and his mother was from Pommern, At the end of World War II in, he fled with his family to Anklam West Pomerania his father died in a Soviet internment camp Fünfeichen.
The family eventually settled in Güstrow, where he attended John Brinckman Oberschule, He went on to study German philology, first in Rostock, then in Leipzig, His Diplomarbeit final thesis was on Ernst Barlach, Due to his lack of political support for the Communist regime of East Germany, he was suspended from the University onJunebut was later reinstated.
Beginning in, Johnson worked on the novel Ingrid Babendererde, rejected by various publishing houses and unpublished during his lifetime.
In, Johnson's mother left for West Berlin, As a result, he was not allowed to work a normal job in the East, Unemployed for political reasons, he translated Herman Melville's Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile the translation was published inand began to write the novel Mutmassungen über Jakob, published inby Suhrkamp in Frankfurt am Main.
Johnson himself moved to West Berlin at this time, He promptly became associated with Gruppe, which Hans Magnus Enzensberger once described as "the Central Café of a literature without a capital.
"During the earlys, Johnson continued to write and publish fiction, and also supported himself as a translator, mainly from English language works, and as an editor.
He travelled to America inthe following year he was married, had a daughter, received a scholarship to Villa Massimo, Rome, and won the Prix International.
for the Berliner Tagesspiegel, s of GDR television programmes boycotted by the West German press published under the title "Der.
Kanal", "The Fifth Channel",. In, Johnson travelled again to America, He then edited Bertolt Brecht's Me ti, Buch der Wendungen. FragmenteMe ti: the Book of Changes, Fragments,. Fromthroughhe worked in New York City as a textbook editor at Harcourt, Brace World and lived with his family in an apartment atRiverside Drive Manhattan.
During this time inhe began work on his magnum opus, the Jahrestage and edited Das neue Fenster The new window, a textbook of German language readings for English speaking students learning German.
OnJanuaryprotesters from Johnson's own West Berlin apartment building founded Kommune, He first learned about it by reading it in the newspaper, Returning to West Berlin in, he became a member of the West German PEN Center and of the Akademie der Künste Academy of the Arts.
In, he published the first volume of his Jahrestage Anniversaries, Two volumes were to follow in the next three years, but the fourth volume would not appear until, Meanwhile, inJohnson became Vice President of the Academy of the Arts and was the editor of Max Frisch's Tagebuch.
In, he moved to Sheerness on the English Isle of Sheppey shortly after, he broke off work on Jahrestage due partly to health problems and partly to writer's block.
This was not a completely unproductive period, Johnson published some shorter works and continued to do some work as an editor, In, he was admitted to the Darmstädter Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung Darmstadt Academy for Speech and Writing two years later he informally withdrew.
Inhe gave a series of Lectures on poetics at the University of Frankfurt published posthumously as Begleitumstände.
Frankfurter Vorlesungen. In, the fourth volume of Jahrestage was published, but Johnson broke off a reading tour for health reasons, He died onFebruaryin Sheerness in England, His body was not found until sitelink,