“He called the square root sign the ‘temple of numbers.’ Inside the temple, numbers were protected, absolute, eternal.” Chapter 1: The Professor The story begins with the Housekeeper, […]
German literature
A Gushing Fountain
“Memory is a gushing fountain.” Part One: Childhood in Wasserburg The novel opens in the fictional village of Wasserburg, a small German town on Lake Constance, during the […]
German literature
Visitation
“The gardener knows that nothing lasts. The gardener knows better than anyone that everything passes.” Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck is a haunting, fragmented novel that traces the lives […]
German literature
Vertigo
“Memory, the insidious gnawing of memory, which so often seems to destroy what it seeks to preserve.” Beyle, or Love is a Madness The book opens with an […]
German literature
The Emigrants
“Memory, the insistent revenant, like the dog that always finds its way back to its vomit.” — W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants Dr. Henry Selwyn The first section […]
German literature
Austerlitz
“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.” Part One The narrator recounts his encounters with Jacques Austerlitz, a man he first meets in the 1960s […]
German literature
The Reader
“The pain I went through because of my love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate.” Part One The novel opens […]
French literature
Out of the Dark
“I was nothing more than a shadow among shadows.” Chapter 1: The Encounter The narrator, Jean, recalls his time in Paris in the 1960s. He meets a mysterious […]
French literature
Dora Bruder
“I will never know how she spent her days, where she hid, in whose company she passed the winter months of her first escape, nor the few weeks […]
French literature
So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood
“Memory is a strange thing. When I was in the midst of it, it wasn’t there, and now that it’s no longer there, I can see it clearly.” […]