Reading List # 132
An entirely subjective list of things to read this summer
We have news!
Beginning this fall, “Reading List Berlin” is going to become more than a newsletter. We’ll be hosting a talk series at Volksbühne starting in November, and we’ll be releasing a podcast. Each episode invites a guest to bring a short reading list that helps us to better understand one of their works. Which novels, poems, research materials or odd archival findings have inspired their writing of this book?
We’re thrilled that Katie Kitamura has agreed to be our first guest.
November 18
Reading List Berlin presents: Katie Kitamura
Reading List Berlin is a new literary talk format at Volksbühne. Hosts Theresia Enzensberger and Patrik Gräb are exploring a different way to talk about literature and current debate: by looking at the sources.
For the premiere, the hosts will talk to acclaimed writer Katie Kitamura about what was on her Reading List while working on her most recent novel Audition. An unnerving and enigmatic work, Audition opens with the unnamed narrator – a successful actress in New York – meeting Xavier, who claims to be her son. As Xavier is inserting himself into the life of the narrator and her husband Thomas, the constructed reality of the novel is shifting like a play that is being re-written and performed/auditioned in real time.
Booker and Pulitzer Prize nominated author Kitamura will offer a new look at this masterfully composed story by discussing the texts, movies and accidental discoveries that accompanied the writing process.
In cooperation with the American Academy in Berlin.
(EN)
8 pm | Roter Salon, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Linienstr. 227
And with that, we’re going on our yearly summer break. But as always, we’re leaving you with some recommendations for your next beach read:
Carlos Barragán - The Yahoo Boys
When Carlos Barragán’s mother falls victim to a romance fraud by a scammer in Nigeria, the author goes on a journey to Lagos and encounters Biggy, Chibuike, Azeez – “Yahoo Boys” that are trying to make ends meet by chatting endless hours with distant Westerners. It’s non-fiction, but it has all the qualities of a good novel. (EN/DE)
Franziska Gänsler - Orca
A breathless thriller about eco-terrorism, this book is at the same time an astute exploration of the psychology of friendship. Cora, Olympia and Ariel are teenage girls that grow up in an impossible world, and Gänsler is masterful at making it feel claustrophobic and expansive at the same time. (DE)
Judith Schalansky - Marmor, Quecksilber, Nebel
When faced with the thankless task of writing about her own writing (what in Germany is known as a “Poetikvorlesung”), Schalansky decided to something beautiful and unexpected: she wrote about materials. Marble, mercury and fog are being examined from the perspective of a brilliant writer, a dedicated nerd, an original polymath. (DE)
Anna de Marcken - It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over
Last week I (Patrik) started reading It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by the author and artist Anna de Marcken. It is a zombie novel but not in the way you would think. For starters, it is narrated by a zombie. She used to be human, but now she is dead, or undead, and has forgotten her name. She lives together with other zombies in a seedy hotel and so far, not much has happened. They talk (they can talk amongst each other), they have a little ritual to mark the loss of various body parts, which is a regular part of the zombie experience unfortunately. The book is beautifully written: an eerie but immediately relatable meditation on mortality, loss and yearning for memories and sensations that you can’t quite recall. (EN/DE)
Clemens J. Setz - Rainer Maria Rilke
It made so much sense to me that Clemens J. Setz translated It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over into German for Suhrkamp. Setz shares with Anna de Marcken a sensibility for the absurdities of our finite, physical existence. This also comes through in a book my mother gave me: Setz short book for Reclam’s Hundert Seiten series on Rainer Maria Rilke. It is a very idiosyncratic book, but it did a fascinatingly good job at getting me hooked on Rilke. I was always a bit suspicious of the uber-poet and what I perceived as his male and slightly embarrassing pathos. Appropriate for a Reclam book, Setz schooled me. Setz took me to Paris with Rilke, to the Hades with Orpheus (another afterlife hotel), and alerted me to the omnipresence of hands in Rilke’s work; hands with a personality, a soul, of their own. For a book of hundred pages, this contains so much Rilke and so much Setz as well - you’d be stupid to pass on this deal. (DE)
Ohhh 📚🤍 Die Eventreihe klingt ganz toll!