{"id":305646,"date":"2017-03-29T20:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-03-29T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2017\/03\/29\/my-marriage-by-jakob-wassermann-why-this-book-should-win\/"},"modified":"2018-05-04T14:44:39","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T14:44:39","slug":"my-marriage-by-jakob-wassermann-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2017\/03\/29\/my-marriage-by-jakob-wassermann-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“My Marriage” by Jakob Wassermann [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists<\/a> and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win<\/a> series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and read!<\/em><\/p>\n

The entry below is by Trevor Berrett of The Mookse and the Gripes.<\/a> He also moderates a GoodReads discussion group<\/a> dedicated to the BTBA<\/span>. Feel free to join and post your opinions and rants and raves.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My Marriage<\/em><\/a> by Jakob Wassermann, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (Germany, New York Review Books)<\/b><\/p>\n

Chad\u2019s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 7%<\/b><\/p>\n

Chad\u2019s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA<\/span>: <1%<\/b><\/p>\n

Wassermann\u2019s My Marriage<\/em> is a beautifully complex emotional and intellectual account of a budding relationship that careened into a failed marriage, based, reportedly, a great deal on the author\u2019s own first marriage to Julie Speyer (whom you can see on the NYRB<\/span> Classics edition cover). How much of the book is actually autobiographical, I don\u2019t know, but perhaps we can take the word of the German literary historian Peter de Mendelssohn, who said it was the \u201cexactest, most scrupulous autobiography,\u201d \u201cthe true confession of the death-marked author,\u201d as per translator Michael Hofmann\u2019s Afterword. At the same time, the book is presented as fiction, with names changed and pasts imagined.<\/p>\n

The book was originally published posthumously in the autumn of 1934; Wassermann himself had died on New Year\u2019s Day of that year of various troubles, including what Hofmann calls \u201cgeneral exhaustion.\u201d After reading this book, we might extrapolate what Hofmann means.<\/p>\n

The book pulled me in immediately. It isn\u2019t happy reading, but it is an exquisite rendering of pain that is brought on by union and separation at once. Wassermann seems to be exploring, trying to comprehend just what happened with this central experience of his life, and I loved the step-by-step exploration of his painful past\u2014not that it was entirely the past.<\/p>\n

Let me introduce the characters who stand in for Wassermann and Speyer. The author\/narrator is a man named Alexander Herzog. He divides his account into three sections: Mirror of Youth, The Age of Certainties, and The Age of Dissolution. Mirror of Youth begins before he\u2019s ever met the persistent, eccentric Ganna Mevis. Again, it\u2019s like Herzog has to go back that far just to get his footing, just to see where this juggernaut that would run through his life got its beginning.<\/p>\n

The youngest of six daughters, Ganna doesn\u2019t fit in. Ganna is fiercely competitive with her sisters. She dreamed of a glorious future. Hers weren\u2019t the usual banal girlish dreams, they were scenarios and imaginings of an usual definition. She felt chosen, even though she couldn\u2019t have said in what way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Meanwhile, in this early section Herzog is a young author who has published one great book that made him no money. Ganna gets a hold of that book and her imaginings tell her that she must be a part of the author\u2019s life. She knows nothing about him, naturally\u2014she even is afraid that any letter she sent would simply be lost amongst the flood of letters Herzog was definitely not receiving\u2014but she pursues him even when he obviously thinks little of her.<\/p>\n

The next day, I got a pneumatique from her. Why the rush, I asked myself. There was nothing pressing in it. The letters were just as urgent as her speech. Big, jagged, impetuous characters that resembled a meeting of conspirators. I can\u2019t remember if I wrote back. It seems to me it was only the third or fourth letter that induced me to give her an answer. Because she wrote to me almost every day. Always pneumatiques. A few lines, with obvious attention to style. I thought sardonically: writing letters to a writer is surely an education in itself. And the content? Atmospherics: happy wonderment at the new turn in her life; a plea to me not to forget her; a friendly greeting because it was a nice day; anxious inquiries about my state, because she\u2019d had a bad dream about me. She wasn\u2019t short of things to say.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Herzog thinks back on this time and tries to understand \u201cwhat possessed me to answer her?\u201d His answer: \u201cI don\u2019t know.\u201d But he has some ideas and he works through them. For one, \u201c[e]ven the most resolute misanthrope has a spot where he falls prey to vanity. And I was anything but a misanthrope.\u201d Still, the notes are exhausting, and he admits that sometimes, \u201cwhen I was opening one of her notes, it was as though I had to push away her little hand that reached for me with greedy grasp.\u201d<\/p>\n

Money, though . . . he\u2019s honest enough to admit that her money and his lack thereof contributed greatly, even if he did his best to leave the subject under the surface. She\u2019s the one who brings it up, and I love Herzog\u2019s lingering amazement, capable of erasing the years between their courtship and his writing this account, taking him back to the initial confusion as his younger self pondered just what she was thinking:<\/p>\n

But patience, Ganna, patience: do you propose to take what you call your wealth, today or tomorrow, and merely drop it at his feet, unconditionally and impulsively and without regard to yourself, and without any reference to any of the usual contracts and obligations? It would be a splendid impulse, whether it were possible or not. Or is some forfeit not required\u2014in fact, wouldn\u2019t the person, the future, the whole man from head to toe have to serve as your collateral? Speak!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We already know where this is heading, despite words of warning from the author himself: \u201cYou can find a woman lovable without loving her; that\u2019s a dangerous grey area.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marriage, honeymoon, children, pain, a slow\u2014and strange!\u2014separation. Throughout, Herzog\u2014Wassermann\u2014shifts back and forth from a distant perspective, trying to see the forest for the trees, to an impassioned closeness. It was his writing that brought Ganna into his life, and it is with his writing that he attempts to exorcise her. He knows in the end that such an act is impossible: \u201cBut in the end it\u2019s just words on paper, which can be turned and twisted and perhaps challenged by a higher instance.\u201d It\u2019s not spoiler to say that he is still struggling even with his last paragraph:<\/p>\n

So what do I need? A hand to help me past an obstacle whose nature I cannot ascertain. A human breath to imbue me with the spirit of understanding. Understanding would surely illumine me like a flash of lightning ripping apart the sheet of darkness. And then the devil riding over the wreckage of my life would disappear with a howl into the gulch of his hell. A slightly overdone image. But then I\u2019ve lost all sense of measure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase […]<\/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":[67476],"tags":[35996,64586,48766,64936,10626,64926,1796,1646,46326,37876],"class_list":["post-305646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba","tag-btba-2017","tag-btba-fiction","tag-jakob-wassermann","tag-michael-hofmann","tag-my-marriage","tag-new-york-review-books","tag-review","tag-trevor-berrett","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305646","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=305646"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":396882,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305646\/revisions\/396882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}