Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "verlag"

You’ll find a lot of writers’ blogs complaining about book tours. Not here. When I find one of my publishers around the world is happy to present me to hundreds of people who want to hear me talk about myself in fascinating places, I sign up right away.

That’s how I found myself in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich with very squeaky shoes.

More on that later…. I spent two weeks in March traveling Germany to promote the translation of my second Palestinian detective novel “A Grave in Gaza,” which is published there by C.H. Beck Verlag as “Ein Grab in Gaza”. It’s a family-owned publisher in business since the 1700s in Munich, run by a charming, shy man named Wolfgang Beck. In a world of megapublishers, there’s something wonderfully intimate about Beck’s office in the Schwabing district of Munich.

I began my tour at Lehmkuhl, a bookshop in Munich. The name means “Mudhole” in German and no one was able to offer an explanation for why anybody had chosen it. But there was a big crowd and a reading by myself and a local German actor. Unlike in other countries, where the audience gets fidgety the moment an author begins to read, Germans will happily listen to three chapters – including one read in English. It makes for long readings. Once you add in questions and banter and signing, they’re at least 90 minutes.

I had a day off in Munich after that and went to the Alte Pinakothek, where I disturbed the peace of the beautiful, airy galleries with a particularly squeaky pair of shoes. Entire school groups turned to see what the disturbance was… I wanted to see the famous self-portrait by Albrecht Duerer. In that portrait, the books all describe Duerer as gazing directly at the viewer, and that’s how it looks in photographs. Interestingly when you stand in front of the painting, it’s clear that he’s actually looking right through you, as though he were staring into some visionary future, focused absolutely on his art.

Or maybe he just couldn’t look me in the eye because of my squeaky shoes.

Thence to the enormous Leipzig Book Fair, held in a series of massive halls outside the historic town in eastern Germany. It’s lovely to see so many readers wandering the stalls, though anyone under the age of 26 appeared to be dressed as a Japanese cartoon character. My reading was hosted by Klaus Modick, a prominent German author who’s also my translator. At dinner in the old quarter of Leipzig in the Zum Arabischen Coffe Baum restaurant, Klaus and I had a long talk about the job of the translator. It was fascinating to hear the kinds of language choices a translator has to make. It’s notable, too, that even though I’ve been translated into 22 languages, Klaus is the only translator who sent me any questions about my original text. (My Danish translator, Jan Hansen, says that’s because I write such clear prose, there’s nothing to clarify. How do you say “You’re too kind” in Danish?)

Klaus also introduced me to “quark,” which is some kind of curd. It turns out Germans are obsessed with it the way Brits love Marmite.

Late that night there was a big publishers’ party in an old storage space beneath the medieval bastions of the city. The band: four German girls doing ABBA songs. Lots of happy German people. Very unhip, very nerdy. Really great!

Also at Leipzig I had coffee at the next table to Gunther Grass. He’s shorter than you’d expect…

How’s that for literary insight?

I went on to the Ruesselsheim area. South of Frankfurt, this is where Opel cars are manufactured – for the time being. Opel’s owned by GM and people are worried it’ll all be gone soon. In a town of 60,000, you can imagine what would happen if the 25,000 jobs at Opel disappeared.

The bookshop in Ruesselsheim is run by Hans-Juergen Jansen and his wife Monika, a charming pair who’ve created quite a cultural scene in this industrial town. So successful, in fact, that my first reading in the area inaugurated the opening of their new bookshop in nearby Gustavsburg. Imagine that: a new independent bookstore. There’s still hope for the world in these dark times, eh?

I also had an excellent pork dish at a restaurant overlooking the fast-flowing River Main in Ruesselsheim. They call the region “Rhine-Main” because of the confluence of the two great rivers. I dubbed the dish “Rhine-Main-Schwein,” and I think it might catch on….

I continued through Marburg, a historic university town on a mountain in the very center of Germany, where I spoke at the Roter Stern bookshop. (That means “Red Star,” and it started out as a communist collective in the 1960s. Nowadays, it’s still a collective, though no longer communist. At least I’m not naming names.)

The final pleasure of the trip was my stop at Schloss Elmau in the Bavarian Alps near Garmisch-Partenkirchen. It’s a gorgeous spa with a heated outdoor infinity pool on the roof. With my eyes on the snowy mountains all around, I swam a few laps with a big smile on my face.

A room at Elmau is 550 Euros a night. The delightful lady from Beck who accompanied me around Germany, Miriam Froitzheim, declared that she wanted to return to Elmau for her honeymoon. Men of Germany, Achtung!: you get an intelligent, beautiful wife AND a few nights at the most lovely hotel you’ll ever experience. Sounds like a deal. Macht schnell!

My reading at Elmau was organized by the wonderful Frau Ingeborg Praeger, who runs the extensive bookshop there. Frau Praeger spends about 40 days at Elmau in between her “outs” at her apartment in Munich. She helps put together the nightly cultural events at the spa – readings and musical performances mostly. When I was there Junot Diaz had just cancelled his appearance because he couldn’t be bothered to come from Cologne all the way up into the mountains to the spa. Which just shows you can win a Pulitzer and still not know which side your bread is buttered (as we say in Britain).

At Leipzig I had met Denis Scheck, a prominent literary critic on German tv and radio. He hosted my reading at Elmau and managed to ask questions no one else had asked, while also translating a summary of my answers into German without notes. At dinner, Herr Scheck proved himself to be quite the bon vivant. He’s writing a book about German wines. Did you know there’s no difference in taste between red and white wine? According to Denis, it’s all a matter of the serving temperature. Serve white wine at room temperature, it’ll taste like red wine. Chill red wine and you’ve got a white wine taste.

I’m teetotal. So it’s good to know that I’m only missing out on one taste experience.

When my second novel A GRAVE IN GAZA was being translated into German, I received an email from my translator. He had a number of penetrating questions about certain phrases I'd used in the book. He also happened to be the only translator who asked me a question about any of my books (and my work is translated in 22 languages so far.) Perhaps it’s not for nothing that Germany is the country where that particular book seems to have had the greatest resonance. It’s also not for nothing that the translator was one of Germany’s most significant literary voices in his own right. I later met Klaus Modick last year in Hamburg, not far from his North German home in Oldenburg. Within 15 minutes, he had smoked five cigarettes and between us we’d come up with the plot for another of my Palestinian detective novels--with a Berlin angle. It's fair to say, we clicked. In return for his plot brainstorming, Klaus asked only that I name a good character “Klaus” and that, as it’ll be a murder mystery, he shouldn’t die too violently. This year in Leipzig Klaus and I chatted over dinner about the German literary landscape. I found it astonishing to hear how rare it is for a German writer to be translated into English. So I’m delighted to give you the insights of this fabulous, sensitive writer, who’s currently summering in that least Germanic of American cities, Los Angeles.

How long did it take you to get published?

My first books were academic literary criticism and thus do not really count. My first novella “Moos” (1984) was rejected by a couple of publishers, but after some months of straying and drifting over editors’ desks it was eventually accepted and became a so called critics’ success, i.e. praises but sales to cry for.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

I don’t think the circulating How-to-write-books-books are helpful. There’s no advice to talent or inspiration. But I did enjoy Stephen King’s “On Writing”, because it is very honest and unpretentious. And I also enjoyed Thomas Mann’s “Novel of a Novel” about the making of his novel “Doktor Faustus”. You can learn from it that ingenuity cannot be learned.

What’s a typical writing day?

Get up at about 8 o’clock, jog through the park, have breakfast, sit on desk, wait for inspiration which is like a cat (doesn’t come when called but only if it wants to), start editing and re-writing yesterday’s shift and use that as a springboard for today’s. Sometimes it works. Have lunch. Have a nap. Afternoons are for research, for reading and correspondances, also for daydreaming about all the great works I haven’t started yet and perhaps never will.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?

It’s a novel about a German-jewish historian who escapes from the Nazis in 1935, emigrates to the USA, struggles through the miseries of exile, makes finally a career at a New England college - but eventually falls victim to the McCarthy witchhunt in the early 50’s. It’s a book about America, seen through the eyes and experiences of a German there. It’s called “Die Schatten der Ideen” (The Shadows of Ideas). If at all and why it’s great should be decided by the reader - the least I can say about it it’s pretty voluminous.

How much of what you do is:
a) formula dictated by the genre within which you write?
Very little to nothing
b) formula you developed yourself and stuck with?
Pretty much all
c) as close to complete originality as it’s possible to get each time?
I’m trying hard ...

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

“This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.” It’s the first sentence of William Goldman’s “The Princess Bride”. It is still my favorite book in all the world and I’m quite jealous about not having written it myself.

What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?

If one picks “the best” one wrongs at least one hundred others. One candidate among the hundreds could be the golden dollar nailed to the mast of the “Pequod” in Melville’s “Moby Dick”.

How much research is involved in each of your books?

Depends on the subject. For “Schatten der Ideen” it took me about a whole year to get my facts together in order to get the fiction. But I have also written books which needed nearly no research.

Where’d you get the idea for your main character?

I ask myself who I could be if I would not be the one I am.

Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?

Not specifically. But I do think that everybody who writes misses something in life (same for readers). R. L. Stevenson once said that writing means to an adult what playing means to the child. That means that not only pain and suffering compel us to write but also pleasures and fun, not only the lack of something but also affluence. (W. Somerset Maugham thought so, too.)

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?

Give it to a reader who will recommend it to another reader who will recommend it to the next and ever so on. Worldwide.

What’s your experience with being translated?

It’s flattering. And it’s interesting, because one realizes that the book one wrote is more than this one and very book. It has siblings now.

Do you live entirely off your writing? How many books did you write before could make a living at it?

I live entirely from writing, or to be more precise from the royalties. That includes not only my own books, but also translations and writing for the media. But my own books are the core of it all.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?

Being introduced to the audience as someone else.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

Writing the truth.

The whole point of travel is to see Red Light districts around the world. That’s what I assume my German publisher C.H. Beck thinks. Or maybe that's what they think I'll like. Anyway, they keep sending me to Hamburg, which has one of the most famous naughty neighborhoods in the world.

At the invitation of the extremely professional Harbour Front Literaturfestival and in the company of my Beck “handler,” I made another visit to Hamburg last month. I really like the place tremendously. Not because of the Reeperbahn, the red light strip, but because the city faces the wide River Elbe in every sense, it’s affordable, and its people are liberal and open.

That’s a very pleasant change for me, given that I live in the Middle East, a region where there’s no water, things are quite expensive, and the people… Well, I think you’ve read about them.

I wandered the Reeperbahn with Miriam Froitzheim, the wonderful Beck lady whose job is to get me on the right trains, feed me, and pretend that it isn’t boring for her to listen to my same shtick every night at my readings. We particularly enjoyed the public toilet on the center-island of the road, which was decorated with two little neon boys peeing pink neon streams of urine at each other.

Other than that, it must be said that red light districts put me in mind less of sex than they do of sexually transmitted disease. Not to mention theft and violence. I gave some money to a beggar because it seemed better than putting it in the slot of a peep-show and headed for the river.

I stayed a couple of nights on the Cap San Diego, a 1920s ocean liner which is now a floating hotel in the heart of Hamburg’s docks (It goes downriver to the sea twice a year). It’s only 80 Euros a night, which makes it pretty cheap for a hotel anywhere in Europe. Its comfortable wooden interiors look out onto the cranes of the dockyard across the rolling Elbe.

You can see the yacht Roman Abramovic (Russian oligarch owner of a boring English soccer club) is building at 1 million Euros a meter, which is less than what he pays for soccer players but still quite expensive. It’ll be 150 meters long when it's finished early in the winter. Along the river is a new Philharmonic building, which probably cost less than the yacht and isn’t crass or disgusting.

From my porthole, I also watched boats ferrying people to the theater on the other side of the river. Now showing, “The Lion King”: a nine-year run, booked six months ahead. Another boat went by advertising “Tarzan,” a musical with songs by Phil Collins which was cast on a German tv reality show.

I commented to Miriam that I’m insulated from such pop-cultural crap. By living in Jerusalem, a city where nothing ever happens. Except terrorism.

She used the opportunity to introduce me to a very useful German expression: “Was bringt dich auf die Palme?” Literally, what sends you up a palm tree? (ie. What drives you nuts?) Answer: Phil Collins musicals, of course.

En route to Hamburg, my train stopped in Hannover. Throughout the intifada, I drove a Mercedes armored car through the West Bank. It had Hannover plates (I’d imported it from Germany). I gave a quiet thanks to the town which had stopped a few bullets for me.

Then it was off to Aachen, near the Dutch border, where my reading was in Charlemagne’s 1200-year-old hunting lodge, the Frankenbergerhof. Charlemagne is the main man in Aachen. His throne sits in the town’s cathedral, which is a beautiful hodge-podge that looks enormous on the outside and is quite small on the inside. Unless the Aachners were hiding some part of it from me.

They also have the Devil’s thumbprint on the door of the cathedral. That happened when Lucifer got his finger caught in the door. The Devil being that stupid, you see.

Opposite the lovely Aachen town hall, I sat for lunch at the Brauerei Goldener Schwan. While some may travel for red light districts, I go for the food. I ate Aachner puttes, also known as Himmel und Erd (Heaven and Earth): blood sausage of a very soft consistency, fried onions, fried apples, and mashed potatos. More Himmel than Erd, I’d say.

I worked off the “puttes” by wandering Aachen with Miriam, a native of the town. Actually I didn’t really walk off the lunch. As we strolled, we bought a packet of Aachner Printen, the clovey gingerbread-like cookies for which the town is famed (not really gingerbread, which is sweetened with honey; these are sweetened with sugar). So on balance I probably got fatter in Aachen.

But at least no one peed neon at me.

Next post: I finish my German-language reading tour in Switzerland and actually take a vacation for the first time in two years, bumping into someone who used to play football for Roman Abramovic… Next post after that: I field emails from people telling me that reading tours sound much like vacations, so I oughtn’t to complain that it’s been two years since I had a formal break….