The first volume of a titanic masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, named one of the best books of 2019 by The New York Times critics.
It is August 1967, and Gesine Cresspahl, born in Germany the year that Hitler came to power, a survivor of war, of Soviet occupation, and of East German Communism, has been living with her ten-year-old daughter, Marie, in New York City for six years. Mother and daughter find themselves caught up in the countless stories of the world around them: stories of work and school and their neighborhood, with its shifting and varied cast of characters, as well as the stories that Gesine reads in The New York Times every day--about Che Guevara, racial violence, the war in Vietnam, and the US elections to come. Now, with Marie growing up, Gesine has decided to tell her daughter the story of her own childhood in a small north German town in the 1930s and 1940s. Amidst memories of Germany's criminal and disastrous past and the daily barrage of news from a world in disarray, Gesine, conscientious, self-scrutinizing, with a sharp sense of humor, struggles to describe what she has learned over the years and what she hopes to pass on to Marie. Marie, articulate, quizzical, with a perspective that is very much her own, has plenty of questions too.
Uwe Johnson's intimate portrait of a mother and daughter is also a panorama of past and present history and the world at large. Comparable in richness of invention and depth of feeling to Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Anniversaries is one of the world's great novels.
Autorentext
Uwe Johnson (1934-1984) grew up in the small town of Anklam, Germany. In 1959, shortly before the publication of his first novel Speculations About Jakob, in West Germany, Johnson emigrated to West Berlin, leaving the East behind for good. His next three novels, The Third Book About Achim, An Absence, and Two Views, followed in quick succession. Johnson lived in NYC from 1966 until 1968 with his wife and daughter. It was during that time that Johnson began work on Anniversaries. Once published, the book was quickly recognized in Germany as one of the great novels of the century. He died in Sheerness-on-Sea, UK, shortly after Anniversaries was published, at age forty-nine.
Damion Searls is a translator from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch and a writer in English. His own books include What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, The Inkblots, and The Philosophy of Translation. He received the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize in 2019 for Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries.