German in the UK

Translated by Anthea Bell
Harvill Secker

Jewish Book Week is thought by many to be London's best literary festival, and my first experience of it this year gave me a taste of why it has gained that reputation. The programme is wonderfully diverse and the events very well attended, with lively Q&A sessions after the talks and readings. I was there in particular for two events with German authors: Jenny Erpenbeck (whose Visitation I reviewed in a recent blog, and who has since been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and Johanna Adorján. Adorján is one of Germany's cultural shining lights – having already written several plays, a screenplay that was filmed by Ed Herzog, worked as cultural editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, and had her debut novel translated into English by Anthea Bell.

To call An Exclusive Love a 'novel' is perhaps not quite appropriate, as the book is far from fiction – and is subtitled 'a memoir' in its American edition. And it is far from being simply a 'German novel' too, as Adorján – half-German, half-Hungarian, born in Stockholm, with a Danish passport – is writing about the lives and deaths of her grandparents, Hungarian refugees to Denmark after the Second World War. The book, then, is an account of the author’s search for the stories behind her grandparents' lives and deaths, but the fiction arises from the main narrative strand, which follows her grandparents' last day – before they commit suicide together, lying in bed hand in hand, at the end of a long Sunday in their adopted home of Denmark.

Her grandmother and grandfather, Pista, were a Hungarian Jewish couple who met in Budapest before the war, brought together by their shared love of music, and began a relationship that Adorján paints convincingly and yet not over-sentimentally as 'true love'. Until their dying day, the couple are devoted to each other, and this intense connection, Adorján suggests, is one of the reasons for their decision to die together. Her grandmother is still well and full of life, but Pista has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and is fading by the day. The suffering that the couple endured during the war, including Pista's deportation to a concentration camp (which Adorján visits with her father as part of her research for the novel), and after the war in the strictures of a Communist Hungary, also feed into potential explanations for their final decision, but Adorján does not rely on that as an easy answer to the question that so plagues her. This is not least because her grandfather remained resolutely silent about his experiences during the war, refusing to share them with his family and so creating a void in Adorján’s family history which her novel goes some way to filling.

Adorján does not suggest that her grandparents killed themselves because of their wartime experiences, nor of their exile in Denmark, but rather depicts the complexity of their lives and the multiple forces acting upon them. Her account brings to light her grandmother's emotional dependence on Pista and suggests that this was one of the reasons for her fervent wish not to outlive him. Adorján's narrative is largely unsentimental, which allows the focus to remain on the characters and on their colourful lives; yet this slightly detached approach, the sometimes clinical prose reflecting the clinical way in which the couple spend their final day, is not without pathos. The moving moments are never laboured, but emerge from the details of the narrative. So the restrained atmosphere in the car, for example, as the couple drive their dog to a friend's to look after 'for a few days', says far more about the impact of their decision than any attempt to describe their emotions might achieve.

Adorján's appearance at Jewish Book Week was full of humour and modesty. When asked why she had felt the need to write this book, she spoke of wishing to try to understand what had led her grandparents to take that decision – to remove themselves from her and her family's life, to enact the exclusivity of their love so completely – but also conceded that she simply wanted to 'get the "difficult first novel" out of the way'. We can be grateful that she did so, and that Anthea Bell has brought it so superbly into English, and can look forward to the fruits of what is set to be an impressive career.

Adorján's novel was reviewed in New Books in German in 2009. For this and other reviews of the best new German-language novels, see www.new-books-in-german.com.

Johanna Adorján was born in 1971 in Stockholm and now lives in Berlin. She studied theatre and opera directing and has worked as an editor and freelance author for various newspapers and magazines. She has been editor of the culture section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin since 2001. She has written plays for the theatre, and a screenplay that was filmed by Ed Herzog.

The Translator Anthea Bell is one of the UK's most prolific and important translators. She has translated a great deal of young adult fiction, including Cornelia Funke's Inkworld trilogy, as well as some of the most significant works of contemporary German literature, such as W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz. She has received numerous awards, including the Schlegel-Tieck prize, most recently in 2009 for her version of Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig. Anthea translated The Blind Side of the Heart by Julia Franck, shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2010, and Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki, both reviewed here on Think German Books.