{"id":290536,"date":"2012-05-23T20:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2012\/05\/23\/latest-review-the-brummstein-by-peter-adolphsen\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:09:51","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:09:51","slug":"latest-review-the-brummstein-by-peter-adolphsen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2012\/05\/23\/latest-review-the-brummstein-by-peter-adolphsen\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest Review: "The Brummstein" by Peter Adolphsen"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest addition<\/a> to our Reviews Section<\/a> is a piece by Larissa Kyzer<\/a> on Peter Adolphsen’s The Brummstein<\/em>, which is translated from the Danish by Charlotte Barslund and available from AmazonCrossing.<\/p>\n

Apparently, this is the week of Larissa and AmazonCrossing books . . . As with her review of The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning<\/em>,<\/a> this sounds like a really interesting book:<\/p>\n

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By examining the minute connections, unlikely coincidences, and painstaking natural processes that give shape to the daily world, the work of Danish author Peter Adolphsen encapsulates\u2014both in form and content\u2014Blake\u2019s image of \u201ca world in a grain of sand.\u201d This has never been more literally true than in his most recently translated work, The Brummstein.<\/em> Beginning in 1907, and ending over eighty years later, the novella follows a mysteriously humming stone found deep within a Swiss cave through its series of unlikely owners: a hapless German anarchist and his young Jewish sweetheart, a retired ticket clerk at a railway station lost & found, an orphan boy living alone in the woods, an avant-garde artist, and a museum curator. In following the ownership of the stone, The Brummstein<\/em> also traces a crash course through European (German) history\u2014in less than 80 pages, the reader experiences both World Wars, Spanish Flu, the rise of the Soviet GDR<\/span>, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But, rather than focus on a larger, more sweeping narrative, The Brummstein<\/em> is told on a much more personal, human scale. [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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But the book\u2019s concern is not really the Brummstein\u2014the mysterious humming stone that an amateur explorer looking for the entrance to another world finds at the beginning of the story is basically a MacGuffin. This has been true for many other “lives of objects” narratives as well\u2014Jenny Erpenbach\u2019s Visitation<\/em> and Nicole Krauss\u2019s Great House<\/em> come to mind\u2014and is not in itself that unique a premise. What makes The Brummstein<\/em> special, then, is Adolphsen\u2019s incredible specificity and gift for compressing deeply incisive observations into just a few short passages. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Click here<\/a> to read the full piece. <\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Peter Adolphsen’s The Brummstein, which is translated from the Danish by Charlotte Barslund and available from AmazonCrossing. Apparently, this is the week of Larissa and AmazonCrossing books . . . As with her review of The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning, this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[43376,46436,19916,16686,14766,19906,1646],"class_list":["post-290536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-amazon-crossing","tag-brummstein","tag-charlotte-barslund","tag-danish-literature","tag-larissa-kyzer","tag-peter-adolphsen","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290536"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311376,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290536\/revisions\/311376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}