An editor at the magazine brushes up on his German. (And grabs a back-up.)
I’m going on vacation to Germany and so it’s time to face up to how little of the German I spent ages learning in high school remains in my head. The typical vacationer’s remedy—and something I’ve often done in the past—is to buy some ludicrously ambitious work of literature in the semi-forgotten language and kid yourself that you’ll get anywhere with it at all. (I know: I’ll resurrect my high-school German by reading “The Magic Mountain” in the original!!) But the other evening, I hit on an alternative to this wild fantasy of self-improvement. I was browsing in the secondhand bookshop Heights Books, which has recently (and oxymoronically) moved out of Brooklyn Heights and into my neighborhood, Boerum Hill. There I picked up an old paperback of “Giovannis Zimmer” and started to read. James Baldwin in German turns out to be much easier than Mann or almost any writer who’s actually German and has thoughts deeply embedded in that linguistic idiom. Nice plain sentences, and, given that I’ve never read “Giovanni’s Room” in English, I’m getting to fill an important gap. And if I don’t even have enough German to get through that, I’m taking along Leonardo Sciascia’s “The Wine Dark Sea,” a collection of short stories (in English). I’ve loved the three short, elegant, peculiar novels that NYRB Classics have republished in recent years. Set in Sicily, they start off as police procedurals with Mafia overtones, but have a way of ingeniously unraveling themselves into uneasy pictures of a society in which it’s essentially impossible to get to the bottom of anything.