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Higher Ground

by Anke Stelling

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414609,610 (3.65)2
A prize-winning novel about class, money, creativity, and motherhood, that ultimately reveals what happens when the hypocrisies we live by are exposed...Resi is a writer in her mid-forties, married to Sven, a painter. They live, with their four children, in an apartment building in Berlin, where their lease is controlled by some of their closest friends. Those same friends live communally nearby, in a house they co-own and have built together. Only Resi and Sven, the token artists of their social circle, are renting. As the years have passed, Resi has watched her once-dear friends become more and more ensconced in the comforts and compromises of money, success, and the nuclear family. After Resi's latest book openly criticises stereotypical family life and values, she receives a letter of eviction. Incensed by the true natures and hard realities she now sees so clearly, Resi sets out to describe the world as it really is for her fourteen-year-old daughter, Bea. As Berlin, that creative mecca, crumbles under the inexorable march of privatisation and commodification, taking relationships with it, Resi is determined to warn Bea about the lures, traps, and ugly truths that await her. Written with dark humour and clarifying rage, Anke Stelling's novel is a ferocious and funny account of motherhood, parenthood, family, and friendship thrust into battle. Lively, rude, and wise, it throws down the gauntlet to those who fail to interrogate who they have become.… (more)
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English (2)  German (2)  All languages (4)
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I'm not sure what to make of this book. Initially, I enjoyed the narrator's pull into her world and the way she illuminated and contextualized her relationships with friends and family. But midway through the book, I started to feel that the narrator began to feel stale; that the progression of detail about her situation waned in breadth and scope. However, as the end of the book approached, it seemed like the narrator regained her stride, and the enjoyment I felt reading the earlier chapters resumed. ( )
  vscauzzo | Jan 29, 2024 |
Another title for #WITmonth, this time a recent release from Melbourne publisher Scribe Publications.

Higher Ground (Schäfchen im Trockenen) by German author Anke Stelling and translated by Lucy Jones won the Leipzig Book Prize and the Friedrich-Hölderin Prize. According to Scribe’s website:

Anke Stelling was born in 1971, in Ulm, Germany. She studied at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. Stelling is a multi-award-winning novelist whose previous works have been much acclaimed. Higher Ground is the first of her novels to be translated into English. Stelling lives and works in Berlin.

Higher Ground is an absorbing novel that kept me interested from start to finish. Laced with dark humour, it’s very contemporary, skewering complacency and hypocrisy among the moneyed classes in Berlin.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/08/20/higher-ground-by-anke-stelling-translated-by... ( )
  anzlitlovers | Aug 19, 2021 |
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A prize-winning novel about class, money, creativity, and motherhood, that ultimately reveals what happens when the hypocrisies we live by are exposed...Resi is a writer in her mid-forties, married to Sven, a painter. They live, with their four children, in an apartment building in Berlin, where their lease is controlled by some of their closest friends. Those same friends live communally nearby, in a house they co-own and have built together. Only Resi and Sven, the token artists of their social circle, are renting. As the years have passed, Resi has watched her once-dear friends become more and more ensconced in the comforts and compromises of money, success, and the nuclear family. After Resi's latest book openly criticises stereotypical family life and values, she receives a letter of eviction. Incensed by the true natures and hard realities she now sees so clearly, Resi sets out to describe the world as it really is for her fourteen-year-old daughter, Bea. As Berlin, that creative mecca, crumbles under the inexorable march of privatisation and commodification, taking relationships with it, Resi is determined to warn Bea about the lures, traps, and ugly truths that await her. Written with dark humour and clarifying rage, Anke Stelling's novel is a ferocious and funny account of motherhood, parenthood, family, and friendship thrust into battle. Lively, rude, and wise, it throws down the gauntlet to those who fail to interrogate who they have become.

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