The second volume of a titanic masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, named one of the best books of 2019 by The New York Times critics.
Beginning in August 1967 and ending in August 1968, Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries unfolds the story of a year in the life of Gesine Cresspahl, a German émigré living in New York, and her ten-year-old daughter, Marie, a year during which Gesine tells Marie her own story of growing up under the Nazis and during and after World War II in a small north German town near the Baltic Sea. 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.
Anniversaries, Volume 2 begins on April 20. Before long Marie will be devastated by the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, even as the news of the Prague Spring has awakened Gesine's long-dashed hopes that Socialism could be a humanism. Meanwhile, her boss at the bank has his own ideas about Czechoslovakia, and Gesine faces the prospect of having to move there for work.
Continuing the story of her past from Anniversaries, Volume 1, Gesine describes the Soviet occupation of her hometown, Jerichow, where her father was installed as mayor and ended up in a brutal prison camp. Gesine herself charts a rebellious course through school, ever more bitterly conscious of the moral ugliness of life behind the Iron Curtain. As the year of the novel comes to its end, past and present converge and the novel circles back to its beginnings: Gesine tells Marie about her father, Jakob, dead before she was born, about leaving East Germany, and, as history threatens to take them away from New York, about the beginning of their life together in the city that they have both come to love.
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.