Uwe Johnson (1934–1984)

Reason read: yearly read for Reading 1001 2022.
Uwe Johnson, German Author, Johnson was born in Kammin in Pomerania (now Kamień Pomorski, Poland). His father was a peasant of Swedish descent from Mecklenburg and his mother was from Pomerania. In 1945 the family fled to Anklam in West Pomerania and in 1946 his father died in a Soviet internment camp. Due to his failure to show support for the Communist regime of East Germany, he was suspended from the university on 17 June 1953, but he was later reinstated. He came to the US in 1961. I think I read some where that he lived at the address that he gave Gesine.
Book original title is Jahrestage. Aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl, 2018 translation by Damion Searls.
The book is written as a diary with a submission for every day of the year from August 1967 to 1968 which includes a leap year, also has a prelude and an appendix. The book does not remind you of a diary but more of a journal and free floating with some confusion as to who is actually talking but it has to all be Gesine because it is her diary. Gesine was born about the time of Hitler coming to power. She endured the war, the soviet occupation, communism and getting herself to the US, finding work, raising her daughter as a single mother. The actual time period finds them in the use for 6 years and the daughter is 10 and Gesine has decided to tell the story of her own childhood and coming of age. So the book is a coming of age story of a German girl and also a historical novel encompassing the past but also the present including; the Vietnam war, Che Guevara, racial violence, elections and assassinations. It also covers the Prague Spring;a period of political liberalization and mass protest in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. It began on 5 January 1968, when reformist Alexander Dubček was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ).
Liked: it wasn't hard to read but it also was not compelling. The decision to read a section every day helped to keep me reading and ultimately finish. It was a panoramic view of history.
Disliked: it was often confusing and hard to know who was speaking, even though it had to be Gesine. And the point was often lost or unclear. Perhaps because it was history through Gesine's eyes and the NYT it was unreliable? It also has or shares a lot of details with the author's life.
Rating 3.4 stars… (more)

links go to reviews of each book on my LibraryThing thread

Book 1 Jan 2 – Apr 27, 2022: 409 pp : https://www.librarything.com/topic/341027#7826511
Book 2 Jun 5 – Aug 14, 2022: 458 pp : https://www.librarything.com/topic/342768#7911179
Book 3 Aug 20 – Sep 28, 2022: 323 pp : rel="nofollow" target="_top">https://www.librarything.com/topic/342768#7945068
book 4 Oct 7 – Dec 10, 2022: 476 pp : https://www.librarything.com/topic/345047#7998458… (more)

Volume 2 of Anniversaries was easier going in many ways as I was familiar with the parallel stories and knew who the characters were. Gesine's life in New York seemed to take on more of a plot in this second volume, and as Nazism took hold in Germany back in the last 1930s I enjoyed the perspective of what it was like to be a German citizen who didn't buy into Nazism and yet had to live in its midst.

The war years were handled by Johnson with greater speed than I'd expected, particularly the end of the war. After that the book became slightly less engaging for me, but in all I enjoyed it.

I've a feeling Volume 3 may feel a little like hitting that marathon wall now that the German war part of the story is past, but time will tell.

4 stars - overall it maintained my interest, but I'm a little nervous about whether I'll have the concentration staying power for the next two volumes.… (more)

A novel in 4 parts or a tetralogy of novels - either description can work. It is closer to being a single novel though - despite the changes between the parts which make it possible to see where the novel was split, it is really one long narrative. Or a few of them really - because there is more than one story in there.

On the surface, the novel looks like a diary - an entry for every day from 21 August 1967 to 21 August 1968 - 368 entries (one which serves as a prelude/introduction and then one for every single day of the period). Their lengths differ and their structure evolves as the novel continues but aside from some random remarks, the novel runs two parallel stories - one in Germany, where we meet Gesine Cresspahl's family and see the rise of Nazism in Jerichow, a fictional town in the Mecklenburg in Northern Germany (destined to end up in East Germany after WWII), through the eyes of the town citizens and the second one in 1967/1968 in New York where Gesine had ended up with her now 10 (later 11) years old daughter Marie.

The two stories are told differently. The German one is told by Gesine, talking to Marie (with interjections from ghosts who really want to talk to Gesine). The later parts of the story are things she knows and remembers but the earlier ones are the stories as they were told to her or that she surmised - and the she wants to share. There is also the author, Uwe Johnson in there, who occasionally takes over but it is always what Gesine wants to tell (she even scolds the author a few times about where he is taking the story). Between Gesine choosing what to mention and the stories being just heard by her, there is a double layer of unreliable narrators in the whole story and yet, it is "a story" of the times and as such it is fascinating. I'd admit that I found the story in the first 2 parts a lot more compelling (albeit not easier to hear) than the one in the later 2 parts (the post WWII story) - there are parts in these later entries which felt almost boring. Towards the end of the novel, these entries also change a bit - while earlier the story went mostly linear, now we get to hear the end of the stories, even when we will meet the protagonists later in the linear story of the past.

The US side of the story is not a straightforward either - it is told in a combination of newspaper articles (from The New York Times - the aunt as Gesine and Marie call her), stories from Gesine's professional life and stories of her life with Marie. If you have any idea of modern European history, the end date of the book should make it clear where this story is heading although with Czechoslovakia barely mentioned in the early parts, it is unclear for a moment if we are dealing with a "meanwhile in" story or a story that needs to end in Prague. In the early entries, most of the entries which we see are about Vietnam, crime in New York, Stalin's daughter memoirs and interviews and so on - topics which will be interesting to anyone living in New York. But slowly, other news start tricking in to us - news of Czechoslovakia, especially with the start of 1968. Slowly, Vietnam takes a second seat, sometimes not mentioned for days on end - not because the newspaper stopped the coverage but because Gesine finds other topics more interesting. Early on, you may be lulled into thinking that we get a picture of New York and the world from the NYT perspective but it was always what Gesine found interesting. Both stories share that - they are the story as seen by Gesine, by way of the NYT in the case of things outside of her daily routine.

These two stories are intricately bound inside each daily entry - the newspaper and day to day ones of the 1967/68 world match the dates; the German ones follow linearly from where Gesine left off the previous day. There is no connection between the two stories besides one being the past of the other or any rhyme or rhythm on why a certain part of the German story was told at a specific time. Although it is not entirely true that there is no connection - there are the ghosts/voices in Gesine's head, there is also Marie, especially in the last 2 parts, asking for the story and driving part of it (although in the third part, there was a point when she felt like a narrative device and not as a child - the author needed a way to work around the fact that Gesine now knew the story and to make sure we still have an unreliable narrator situation going on). Each entry has its own structure - some stay in just one of the timelines, most of them have a story in both, with no visual differentiation - a paragraph ends and we switch times. Add to this the constant switch between the first and third person narration and the novel could get confusing in places (especially when the two timelines get switched multiple times in the same page). It requires you to pay attention although by the middle of the novel, it felt almost natural and by the end, I almost stopped noticing the jumps - habit took over and my brain just sorted the story where it belonged. That may also had been helped by me abandoning the plan to try to read day per day or week per week and reading it as any other novel instead.

And in this long narrative, the omissions sometimes speak louder than the story. Take for example Gesine and Jakob's love story - we hear everything about her pining about him as a girl but she just sketches the change from friends to lovers. You would think that if there was one story the Gesine will want to tell to Jakob's daughter, it will be that one. And yet - she demurs. Is it because Marie knows the story? Or is there another thing going on? There is a sentence in there, almost at the very end, an almost throwaway one ("I can't believe how completely we all trusted Jakob!") in a paragraph talking about Jakob trying to protect Gesine which hints at something else and I am not sure I would have really paid attention to it if I did not know the plot of the very first novel by Johnson ([Speculations about Jakob]). That earlier novel fills the gap that this bigger novel leaves open - in the same way how the real history events fill gaps in the the rest of the story - not because they are not important but because they are too important and already known.

If you check the author's biography, you will notice that there are a lot of parts where his story matches Gesine's (but also a lot where it does not). It does make you wonder how much of what we read about is real and how much is invented, where reality ends and the novel begins. But then it does not really matter - the novel is a chronicle of the rise of Nazism and chronicle of the Prague Spring (the first through the stories a girl born in mid 1930s knows; the later mainly through the eyes of the New York Times). Mixed into them is the personal story of a mother and a daughter in New York, of New York and USA of 1967/68 (between Vietnam, MLK and Bobby Kennedy, one may be almost forgiven for not paying that much attention to events in Prague). There is a historical novel, a novel of contemporary events and a novel of manners rolled into one. And what stays with you are the people - Gesine and Marie, Cresspahl and Jakob, D.E. and Francine, Anita and Lisbeth... and many many more. The times and history are characters of the story but they do not take over the pure human story. And because of that, the end managed to shock me - not the very end (famous last words came to mind when reading these last sentences) but the events of a few days earlier, the ones that make sure that Gesine is too distracted to pay attention to the world news. I knew that this story does not have a happy ending but even like that, the August 1968 entries came as a surprise - an end not without hope but still...

I can keep talking about this novel for a very long time. There are a lot of things which I want to point to (the bank, de Rosny, the New York of 1968, Marie (when not used as a narrative device at least), the people of Jerichow and New York - they all are worth mentioning and there is so much more that you can say about the story). But then there is no way to really cover everything, even on the surface so I will leave it at that. And I am planning to track down that early novel and read it.

If you are in the mood for a very long story which takes a long time to form, give this one a chance. It may drag in places and I am still not sure that the connection between the different stories is strong enough to carry it as a unified whole and if it would not have been better as a strictly linear story (and with less jumping between the first and third person narration) but even with that in mind, it is still worth reading.… (more)