Otto de Kat

Emma looks back over her life as she waits for her son and the euthanasia team (this is modern Rotterdam, and she is in her 90s).

"She did notice, though, that her memory was becoming overloaded. Emma wandered through her recollections along a complex network of corridors, the crumpled map of her life. She was ninety-six years old, she had witnessed a century, and understood nothing at all."

She remembers her first husband's involvement in the plot against Hitler, her escape from Germany and show more a long life lived in peace. There are still secrets and family conflicts, and the tone is bleak and littered with poetry and philosophy quotes. To me it is like a different world, and I liked visiting it.

"Vagueness piled on top of rumour and speculation , on dreams and suspicions: family history is a constant stream of knowing almost nothing , a scrap of insight here and there, an unintentional discovery. Those who find out and understand something do so by accident. The past is black, her parents’, and her own as well."

Completists please note: ťhis connects characters from three other books, so you might want to read those first. show less

Beautiful, sad, soulful, lonely and exquisitely painful. A novel which should be read over and over to extract all its richness. Rich in language, pacing, characterizations; the conciseness of the words, the beautiful settings, and provocative atmosphere.

At first glance this book can appear boring, too quiet, little action. But looks are deceiving. Kat tantalizes us with small drops of material, then gives us more information, and more and more. Soon we are overwhelmed by what we believe is show more the whole of it. But its not... the words are concentrated into a stunning powerhouse of intense love, dreadful miscommunications, potent desire, repressed memories, inconceivable loss, distress and fear.

Brilliant and dynamic! show less

Thank you to Quercus Books and Netgelley for an advance copy of this work.

In Rotterdam it is Emma Verweij's last day. She is 96 years old and finally ready to die, but not before she thinks back over the loves and losses of her long life. Her fragmented reminiscences tell of her flight from Nazi Germany in the wake of the failed Von Stauffenberg assassination attempt, hiding in an isolated Black Forest village and her attempts to build a life in Holland.

For years she has tried to bury her show more memories of the war but now they are hard to ignore. Her story weaves between several different periods of her life so that her story only emerges only slowly and we learn about her family: her parents failed marriage, her husband's role in the war and the family she has managed to build in Rotterdam.

In a circuitous, unhurried narrative that effectively expresses both the disjointed state of Emma's failing thoughts and the way that our memories can creep up on us, thoughts of one event, one person sparking memories of another, years later. Emma approaches parts of her life indirectly, circling the more painful parts and offering small details until she is ready to face them more clearly.

It's a story infused with sadness and secrets and regret and the tone is a little distant but in a way that feels entirely appropriate for the end of a long life when one might finally be able to look back with some detachment. It's an abstracted, ephemeral piece of writing that feels deeply personal and addresses guilt, love and shells that we build to protect ourselves. To me this is the kind of story that the Gustav Sonata, which I read a few days earlier, aspired to be. show less

I love it when a book that’s on my wishlist waves at me from the new books shelves at the library! There it was, News from Berlin which Grant at 1st Reading had so enticingly reviewed, so of course I brought it home. And read it straight away because it’s only just over 200 pages long and I couldn’t put it down.
Otto de Kat is the pen name of Dutch author, publisher, critic and poet Jan Geurt Gaarlandt. The book jacket tells me that his award-winning novels have been widely published show more throughout Europe and Man on the Move (2009) was the winner of Holland’s Halewijn Literature Prize. News from Berlin is translated by Ina Rilke who also translated two books by noted Dutch author Hella Haase that I have read, so I knew the translation would be good.
And it is. The translation is excellent. News from Berlin is a sophisticated psychological thriller, exploring the moral choices that arise during war. In June 1941 Dutch diplomat Oscar Verschuur is in neutral Switzerland engaged in a number of covert activities including assistance to refugees. The Nazis (who seem to be welcome in ‘neutral’ Switzerland) are keeping a close eye on him of course, and he has to be careful because his daughter Emma in Berlin is married to a German called Carl who is also engaged in activities under the radar, and his wife Kate is in London (where she is absorbed in the care of an injured Congolese soldier caught up in Belgium’s support for the allied cause against the Nazis in Africa). Right at this time Oscar has also met, and seems to have fallen for, a very gorgeous but enigmatic woman called Lara who might, or might not, be someone to be wary of. And all these characters are in a state of flux, not only stateless, but also at risk of the war reaching them even when theoretically safe in neutral countries like Switzerland and Portugal.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/08/08/news-from-berlin-by-otto-de-kat-translated-b... show less