Fckin awesome: Uckermark ftw! ( )

Stanišić has either strongly supported or revitalized the patchwork village portrait novel. The first striking technique is a first person plural narration, a more precise identity for which is hinted at but never revealed. As he drips from one place to another, he gives his non-human characters no less respect than the human ones, and provides an immense and honest grace for them all. Execution of the characters' interaction, building tension despite skipping from one thread to another, and characters in the background never fully revealed suggest that Stanišić is well-acquainted with small town novels or small towns, but most likely both. The prose is unexpected of itself, and the first plural provides authority that is consistent with the historical flashes that dot the narration. No continuity is lacking, though the length of the sections give a concise staccato air. ( )

Fürstenfelde, between two lakes in the Uckermark north of Berlin, has all the typical problems of rural life in the New Bundesländer — an ageing and shrinking population, unemployment, neo-nazis, declining services, Wessies turning the few desirable properties into craft centres and potteries, Dutch farmers buying up the arable land, and so on. And of course it has seen more than its fair share of horrors over the past four or five centuries of border wars and political turmoil. Plenty of scope for a panoramic realistic novel like Juli Zeh's Unterleuten, which came out two years later.

But Saša Stanišić doesn't quite do that: he is writing a multiple-PoV community novel celebrating the oddities of the villagers, and he touches on all the obvious problems of 21st century life in small communities in the Uckermark, but he compresses it all into an unusually tight timeframe, in the night before the annual village festival, when all kinds of crazy things happen to people in the village as tragedies and folktales from centuries ago start to get mixed up with their present-day lives.

It's partly a charmingly comic view of the oddity that can flourish in small communities, partly a hard look at how big events trample on people, but mostly a celebration of the way history is defined both by the endlessly diverse individuals whose acts it summarises and by the endlessly diverse ways we read it and react to its stories. Very interesting. ( )

This book sort of reminds me of a more folkish, chaotic cousin of Milan Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being", I think because both books are made up of small vignettes of various characters in the past and present to form a larger story, with plenty of social and political commentary. It's written very lyrically and put together in a whimsical, disjointed fashion. There's an atmospheric weariness to the story, a dryness that translates into abrupt humor.

I wouldn't consider this book plot-driven; it's not really about the death of the ferryman. It's about these village people who, through several generations, have been through World Wars, multiple political systems, been citizens of a wealthy country, and yet again, citizens of an ideologically split, war-ravaged, penniless Germany; people who've had the unfortunate experience of witnessing the collective worst of humanity in their own countrymen, and the consequences of their choices. ( )

I ultimately went from liking Before the Feast in an agreeable way to falling in love with it. It was just the oddest, loveliest book. I took a while to get into its rhythm and figure out what was going on, but it grew on me with every page until I was really sorry to finish it. Let's see... kind of like Grimms Fairy Tales meets Wisconsin Death Trip meets Samuel Beckett meets a DDR Spoon River Anthology... oh, I don't even have enough references to triangulate with.

The book takes place over the course of one night in a little East German village, and there's no plot to speak of. The subject is basically how all of history is made of people, places, and stories, using the hyper-local to comment on the bigger picture. But where a more sprawling novel with that kind of focus would be called a tapestry, the scale of this one makes me think of a hand-drawn map, with all its oddities and beauty. It's contemporary and at the same time mythical—both within the modern narrative and the interwoven centuries-old legends—full of wonderfully black political humor, quirky without being cute, dreamlike and mundane. Definitely one to reread, and I don't reread often—I really wanted to start over right away, but I'll let it sit and percolate a bit (plus I want to suggest it for a books-in-translation book group I might join and if so, I'll reread it then).

The lack of plot means this isn't for everyone, but if it sounds like your kind of thing it probably is. ( )