DN’s critics choose the most interesting books right now
The brilliant German author Daniel Kehlmann’s new novel « Light Game » (« LichtSpeil, translation of the excellent Jesper Festin) ends up on Easter week’s criticism list. It is a novel that starts from film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst and his now fairly forgotten deed.
It was a pretty tragic life. He became one of the foremost in Germany in the 1920s, was beaten by Hollywood, traveled home to care for his sick mother and got stuck when the borders were closed because of the war. Then the Propaganda Ministry came up with requirements. Sandra Stiskalo Reviews insightfully the novel here.
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Daniel Kehlmann’s humor is especially German, you might say. It is based on simply placing important seriousness in often strange situations where they, after all, try to preserve their dignity. It is a redness’s reddish slapstick. As the Bifigure Professor Stelzner in « Light Games ». He sits on a home too old and pee gloomy in his fish and his table neighbor says that in the forest she has seen a deer with broken horn.
Professor Stelzner pointed out that one could no longer trust the deer, but even less on the birds. They flew around as if there was nothing important to do. It was pure idiocy.
Anyway, the deer, she said. The horn. She had been pregnant, and her husband had seen it as a sign.
Apart from the carbon blacks, Stelzner said. They took advantage of time. They were good people.
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I met Kehlmann ten years ago, at the Book Fair in Gothenburg. We talked a great deal About German humor and about how far you can go when writing about a biographical person. Had I met him today, I would have asked why in « Light Games » lets PG Wodehouse go by the name Rupert Wooster (Bertie Wooster is one of the English author’s most famous figures) when all other biographical figures have their real names. Maybe it has something to do with copyright.
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Finally, I summed up his life right now that it sounded like he was walking around and had fun. He replied:
– No, I’m desperate. It feels like everything is going in the put and will fail, but so it has felt every time and that is why I am still hopeful.
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1. Fredrik Sjöberg: « Bruno Liljefors. A biography »
Albert Bonniers Förlag, 387 pages (4)
Entertaining biography that captures the entire extent of the artist’s messy life and deed.
2. Isabella Nilsson: « Emptiness and tenderness »
Empire, 160 pages (1)
Hundreds of short texts about loneliness, writing, reading and impossible reality.
3. Hanna Johansson: « Body Double »
Norstedts, 205 pages (2)
Enigmatic, thriller -like novel that artificially plants uncertainty in the reader.
4. Daniel Kehlmann: « Light play »
Overs. Jesper Festin, Albert Bonnier’s publisher, 368 pages (new)
Slapstick and tragic alternate in the novel about German film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst during Nazism.
5. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: « Dream count »
Overs. Niclas Nilsson. Albert Bonnier’s publisher, 474 pages (3)
Four African women come to speak in a grand and about the novel about love.
6. Irmgard Keun: « Children without land »
Overs. Martin Lagerholm. Lind & Co, 196 pages (9)
Roman from 1938 with autobiographical elements about children on the run from oppression and powerlessness.
7. Liza Alexandrova-Zorina: « The land of the liver »
Overs. David Szybek. Volante, 222 pages (8)
Brave and shocking reports on the exile cruisers who are used black in the construction industry.
8. Viktoria Amelina: « See the women see the war »
Overs. Ola Wallin. Ersatz, 375 pages (5)
The documentary depictions from the war in Ukraine become a shaking and emergency document.
9. Hans Gunnarsson: « The narrow happiness »
Albert Bonnier’s publisher, 262 pages (6)
Novelflier about ordinary everyday life that hides as sadly as dull dramas.
10. Jon Fosse: « Whiteness »
Overs. Lars Andersson. Albert Bonnier’s publisher, 64 pages (7)
The short novel of the Nobel Laureate is a solid meditation around dying in a black forest.
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