Felicitas Hoppe

The narrator of this novel constantly shifts between being an audience-member and backstage reporter at a 21st-century open-air performance of a play based on the medieval Nibelungenlied and being a witness directly involved in the events of the story. Sometimes she is interviewing actors in the interval, sometimes she is travelling down the Rhine or the Danube in a leaky dinghy.

All this multi-media ambiguity — because Fritz Lang's 1924 silent film is always there in the mix as well — show more gives Hoppe the chance to toss around complicated thoughts about epic stories and their representations in culture, the way theatre and film work, and how it might feel to be stuck in the rigid logic of such a story.

But she's also looking at the oddities of this particular story and the characters in it. Was the personality of nordic action-maiden Brunhild actually based on Pippi Longstocking? Is everything really Siegfried's fault? How is it that the king of the Huns, Etzel (Atilla), has so little to do in the story? Was Kriemhild beautiful, evil, or both? How did a man from the Worms Rowing Club in a Woolworth's track-suit get mixed up in it all? Was the final showdown in Etzel's hall actually a cake-fight?

An interesting mix of the serious and the silly, which, whilst it doesn't attempt to deny that they matter too, goes out of its way to avoid getting bogged down in the most obvious discussion points (injustices of feudalism, blond-hero-cult, negative roles of women, cruelty to dragons and dwarves, the way the Nazis used the story, etc.). We are presumed to be aware of all that sort of thing, I suppose. show less

In the autumn of 2015, the novelist Felicitas Hoppe, accompanied by German-based Russian sculptor Alexej Meschtschanow, photographer Jana Müller and the Viennese-American Professor Ulrike Rainer of Dartmouth College, set out on a road-trip across America sponsored by the Goethe-Institut and Villa Aurora. The trip was part lecture-tour, part art-project, and part a virtual collaboration with the famous Russian comic writers Ilf and Petrov, who made a similar road-trip - sponsored by Pravda - show more in 1935. The group's blog http://www.3668ilfpetrow.com/ documents the two trips in parallel, illustrated inter alia by Jana Müller's photographs of Ilf and Petrov's book in a succession of American motel rooms. It concludes with an impressively detailed account of miles covered, gallons of petrol, water and coffee consumed, packs of cigarettes smoked, and pillows slept on.

But Hoppe is someone who likes to mess with our expectations of form and genre, so the novel she put together out of the journey is nothing as straightforward as a conventional travel book. As we see from the start, when we're introduced not to the four real travellers of the blog, but to four fictional characters who seem to share their outward characteristics, but not their names. And more so when we realise that this is much more a journey through the America of the (outsider's) imagination than any kind of real-world road-trip. Hoppe hardly bothers to describe anything she sees out of the car window, and during their stops we hear little about the towns, museums and famous sights, much more about the process of getting to them and the people met along the way. Strangers who happen to catch her eye, like a waitress who served them in a Detroit diner or a hotel commissionaire in Chicago, are built up imaginatively into major characters who pop up repeatedly in the book and comment on the subsequent action. We also notice that some of the stages of the journey don't entirely fit into our idea of a realistic travel narrative - there's the very best literary authority for being picked up by a tornado and whirled to a place where the normal rules don't apply, of course, but it's not the sort of thing that ever happened to de Tocqueville or to Fanny Trollope. Suffice it to say that besides Ilf and Petrov, there are Karl May, Mark Twain, The Wizard of Oz, Dr Seuss and The Simpsons all playing a big part in this trip, as does a graphic artist called Brueghel-the-very-youngest, not to mention a host of other more transitory cultural references.

Although it's a two-way trip from East to West coast and back again, the journey seems to run out of steam after a visit to a New Orleans graveyard - like the one in Easy Rider! - and we don't hear much of the West-to-East trip apart from an (imaginary) Thanksgiving dinner with the Obamas.

I'm not sure quite where this trip took us, in anything other than a narrowly geographic sense, but it is very entertaining to go along with Hoppe's irrepressible leaps of the imagination. Not that I would have wanted to be in that car in real life, fascinating though the conversation must have been: it would have been a truly hellish trip for a non-smoker. show less

A hilarious take on the autobiography; she doesn't write about the life she's actually had, but the life she might have had... if she'd been kidnapped by her dad at a young age and adopted by Wayne Gretzky's family. She writes it like a dry (and very German) critical study in third person of how these life experiences may have shaped her writing, throwing in (fake?) quotes from (fake?) critics about (fake?) books lambasting her for pointless exercises in nonsense literature, gets her story show more mixed up with The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Pippi Longstocking, Captain Grant's Children, Tom Sawyer etc, runs it all through a blender, and has Glenn Gould play it. Bizarre, not necessarily accessible, but lots of fun. show less

What is this hypocrisy, cried the first mate, who knew perfectly well that I'd been neglecting my duties as a passenger for weeks.

A novel based on a round-the-world journey Hoppe did on board a cargo vessel in the 90s, reimagined by adding the ghost of Antonio Pigafetta, one of the few survivors of Magellan's expedition 500 years earlier. After reading her excellent autolieography Hoppe I had high hopes for this, but they mostly end up sloshing around soggily in the hold; there are some show more touches of genius, but mostly the story feels neither neither nor nor; as if Hoppe can't decide whether to give her imagination free rein or just stick with realism and doesn't do either.

On the plus side, it reminded me how good Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica is. show less