Back Reviews Reel: July 2014

At this time three years ago, I read two contemporary European novels and two classics by recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature, one of them actually a bit forgotten. My first literary trip took me to present-day Lisbon with a Dutchman who wonders in The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom at how he got there overnight. From the Iberian Peninsula I moved to Western Germany in the 1970s to gorge myself at The Mussel Feast by Ingeborg Bachman Prize winner Birgit Vanderbeke for a tyrannical father. Then I followed the tracks of a young Galician Jew immigrating from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy to Palestine in 1910 in the classic novel Only Yesterday by S. Y. Agnon, the 1966 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature from Israel. And finally, I landed in Korea between 1881 and 1945 with The Living Reed by American Nobel laureate in literature Pearl S. Buck.

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The narrating protagonist of The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom is a former Latin teacher who has been writing popular travel guides for a living for nearly twenty years. One morning he finds himself in a hotel room in Lisbon all of a sudden although he went to bed in Amsterdam the night before. The room is the same as the one where he stayed in the 1960s with the only woman whom he ever loved, namely a married teacher colleague from his high school. He dismisses the idea that this may be life after death and wanders about the port city. Eventually he boards a ship heading for South America. Each of the other passengers has to tell a story about his or her life respectively and at last it’s the turn of the protagonist to tell his.
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It’s Western Germany in the 1970s. The eighteen-year-old protagonist of The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, the 1990 winner of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, and her family are preparing the father’s favourite dish (that everybody else dislikes) for a special dinner meant to celebrate his long-expected promotion. While they are waiting for his return from an official trip and it gets later and later without a sign from him, they begin to sip wine that soon evokes memories of their life since the time when they fled from the German Democratic Republic just in time before the Berlin wall was put up in 1961. After a while, all the repressed anger against the despotic father who has been cowing and abusing them during all this time breaks through the surface.
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The monumental novel Only Yesterday by the almost forgotten Israeli Nobel laureate in literature of 1966 S. Y. Agnon brings to life Palestine in the early twentieth century, when the country was part of the Ottoman Empire. Isaac grows up in the remote Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia dreaming of life in the Holy Land of the Thora. To spare his son the obligatory military service in Emperor Francis Joseph’s army, Isaac’s father scrapes together the money needed for the travel and thus the young man arrives in Jaffa in 1910. He finds himself in an unexpected crowd of immigrants and has a hard time finding a way to make a living, even more so because unlike him the majority of immigrants are Russians and rather orthodox in their beliefs as well as customs. But he holds on.
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The Kims of Andong are one of the noblest families in Korea and can look back on a long tradition as scholars in the royal service, but when the story of The Living Reed by Pearl S. Buck, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1938, begins in spring 1881 times are changing. The family of Kim Il-han is just as torn between conservative and progressive ideas as the entire country. The first, including his father and the Queen, want to continue the century-old policy of seclusion under Chinese protection, while the latter, he and the King, want to open the country up to the west, notably to the USA, and to modernisation. With the years tensions between the opposing groups grow constantly and rebel groups form, while Japan is already preparing for World War II.
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