Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson

 


I do so wish I could read this masterpiece but, alas, 1,700 pages of small, light font would be too much for my 73-year-old eyes.  

So, I have included Parul Sehgal's New York Times review as a tribute to the German author and his novel that took 15 years to complete.  

ANNIVERSARIES by Uwe Johnson ----- Review by Parul Sehgal 

There is a Borges story about a map so exact, so precisely detailed, it grew to the size of the place it depicted. The map had become the territory.

“Anniversaries,” Uwe Johnson’s oceanic, nearly 1,700-page masterpiece, performs a similar trick. Originally published in Germany, in four volumes between 1970 and 1983, it has been translated into English in full, for the first time, by Damion Searls. It is a novel that swallows reality — as noisy and demanding as the world itself.

To be fair, if the book subsumes your life, it’s because it leaves little time for anything else — at least at the rate I set to meet my deadline: a daily regimen of 500 pages or (more usually the case) until my eyes started to sting. I had entertained visions of Somerset Maugham traveling across the desert, as the story goes, reading Proust and ripping out each page as he completed it. But my experience felt closer to shoveling snow in the middle of a blizzard. With a fork. Any progress seemed futile against the rush of information. This book aims to be comprehensive on every topic it takes up — among them, village life in postwar Germany, housing segregation on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, media coverage of Vietnam and the lead up to the Prague Spring. I read to the point of word-intoxication, passed out on the page, woke up, kept going.

“Anniversaries” is not difficult reading, but it is painstaking. The story is tangled, the characters traumatized and suspicious of language. It requires a hard chair, a fresh pen and your full attention — for attention is its great subject.

The novel takes the form of a yearlong diary by the enigmatic, rather brilliant Gesine Cresspahl, born in Germany the year Hitler came to power. Through some shady maneuvering she got herself and her small daughter, Marie, to New York in 1961. Gesine is haunted — by her family’s embrace of Nazism, her mother’s suicide, the death of her daughter’s father — and she takes an apartment in Manhattan and enters into a new kind of nightmare. It is a city of empty lots, roiling protests and “scar-encrusted cats.” Gesine is horrified by the Vietnam War and the savagery of American racism, how quickly Marie learns to act casually superior to black people and how ferociously white New Yorkers, and her Jewish neighbors, work to keep the city segregated.

“Subjectivity remains the most important criterion of the diary,” the German writer Christa Wolf wrote in her own very unusual diary, “One Day a Year,” in which she recorded the events of a single day — Sept. 27 — for over 50 years. In “Anniversaries,” however, subjectivity is annihilated. The pronouns are wildly unstable: Gesine refers to herself as “I,” then “she,” then sometimes even “we.” Her accounts of “her” day are given over to news reports, sometimes in full (she is obsessed with The New York Times, and the paper inspires in her all the passion, pleading, scorn and occasional disappointment of a love affair). Or she channels the past of her ancestors — or her ancestors intrude into the narrative to taunt or praise or beg for her forgiveness. Other times, the diary follows Marie, a worldly 10-year-old flâneur, “cool as a gherkin,” who combs the Bowery looking for adventure.

This kind of syntactic ambiguity sets off a burst of ethical questions: Where do the borders of a person, and her responsibilities, really begin and end? We follow the world through Gesine’s diary — the long, bloody year of 1968, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. As Marie grows up, the questions mother and daughter pose to themselves and each other grow ever more complicated. When is attention without action sinful? When do we use our responsibilities to our children as a way of shirking other, perhaps even greater obligations? Searls’s superb translation inscribes Johnson’s restlessness and probing into word choice and the structures of the sentences themselves, which quiver with the anxiety to get things right, to see the world as it is.

“America was a rumor. I came to verify the rumor,” Johnson told The Times in a 1966 article about his own move to New York, to the same address he gave Gesine: 243 Riverside Drive, Apt. 204. (He and his narrator also share elements of the same family history, of Nazi relatives and abandonment). Johnson had been a fiery prodigy; at 27, he was the third recipient of the International Publishers’ Prize, after Samuel Beckett and Borges. He fled the stifling world of German literary celebrity and took a job with a New York publishing house, assembling an anthology of German literature. He floundered, and considered devoting his life to translating his beloved Faulkner when he had a chance sighting.

On April 18, 1967, at 5:30 p.m., the sun dipped behind a cloud and Johnson saw a woman he recognized, walking on the south side of 42nd Street, along Bryant Park. He knew her by the way she held her head and “her relaxed yet vigilant way of swinging her right arm, with a small black purse in her hand (perfect for hitting back with, if necessary), locked into place by her fingers, from the first two of which the frame of her sunglasses was swinging.” It was Gesine.

Johnson always referred to his fictional characters as people in their own right. He resurrected them from one book to the next (Marie’s father, Jakob, is the protagonist of a previous novel “Speculations About Jakob”) and reported running into them in the city. Johnson claimed that Gesine, upon seeing him that evening in April, protested: “Oh no. Not again.” She knew he had a use for her.

The novel took 15 years to complete. By some accounts, Johnson wrote himself to death, passing away, at 49, just months after handing in the last volume, in a small English seaside town named, appropriately enough for Johnson, Sheerness.

The excess of this book can feel occasionally oppressive, the detail mismanaged even — must every tertiary character come equipped with such a lavishly imagined back story? But two days without the novel now, and I’m lonesome for its patient, laboring gaze, a kind of holy attention that Gesine recalls in her youth: “As children, in haystacks, caught in a storm, we thought: Someone can see us. We are all seen.”