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Loading... Speculations about Jakob (1959)by Uwe Johnson
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Belongs to Publisher Seriesedition suhrkamp (1818) Fischer Bücherei (457) Meulenhoff editie (1080) suhrkamp taschenbuch (0147) Is contained inHas as a reference guide/companionHas as a commentary on the textHas as a student's study guide
When Jakob Abs, an East German railroad dispatcher who's been sought by the Russians to help recruit a girl for Soviet espionage, is killed on his return home from visiting this NATO employee in West Berlin, speculations abound "as layer after layer of recollection, overheard conversation, and inner monologue is peeled away."--Cover. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)833.914Literature German and related languages German fiction Modern period (1900-) 1900-1990 1945-1990LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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So, if you expect a "tale well told" and a page-turner, turn away. If, on the other hand, you want to see the ripped backside of language (German!) and succumb to a reader's PTSD, and tie a knot into your reading list, go ahead.
Johnson is one of the few truly accursed fiction writers who combines astonishing technique, inconceivable structural solutions and the bleeding truth of history, which he is able to see with a clear perspective as if he were generations away, even as it is smothering him. It is a mystery much more disturbing than the fact that one has to dig deep into the text to excavate the chronology and aetiology of events.
Johnson tells the tale of a meticulous, brilliant train dispatcher who gets hit by a train - if you get the irony and the allegorical meaning of the plot (revealing the works of the evolving GDR socialism), you will not follow the blurb's guesswork advice: is it a suicide? is it a murder? is it an accident? There is nothing solid about the case: all is speculation, ideology turns everyone into a spy, whatever you know reaches you through the grapevine, any person is a dossier, a paper trail of disparate font faces and handwriting samples (which is, thankfully, not played out in the book's typography). And a whole range of strikingly variegated personalities naturally disrupt the flow of the text, incorporate the inevitable conflict of the individual with the ideological, convert the book into a kind of chaotic explosion diagram of the time and place that expelled and eventually destroyed the writer.
While I wasn't even always sure whose words I was reading and what exactly happened in terms of the plot and why, I know now that I have never read anything as convincingly clear, truthful and personal as "Mutmaßungen über Jakob" about the ambitions and conflicts of the post-war socialism.
And yes, it is very autobiographical, and, yes, some characters even have close prototypes with similar fates. ( )