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Michael Köhlmeier: Occident (Abendland)
Hardcover | 784 pages | ISBN 9783446209138 | August 2007 | Hanser Verlag
English excerpt
The Book: Carl Jacob Candoris – 59-year-old mathematician, cosmopolitan, dandy and jazz fan – lays bare his life in this turbulent, touching history of the 20th century.
Sebastian Lukasser is a writer and the son of guitarist Georg Lukasser, whom Carl Jacob Candoris first befriended in the jazz clubs of post-war Vienna and supported until the musician’s sad demise. Blending his own story with the life of the eccentric Carl Jacob, Sebastian traces a fascinating panorama, as an entire century is mirrored in the history of two very different families. Candoris tells of his grandfather who ran a famous grocer’s shop in Vienna and of the strange relatives he stayed with during his studies in Göttingen – where he also met distinguished scientists he would reencounter, years later, in Los Alamos, as “the fathers of the atom bomb”. He tells of the War and Europe’s destruction and the post-war years, when Sebastian’s own story begins. In this interweaving of art and life, of great historical crimes and private responses, of political and personal hopes, the spirits and demons of an entire epoch are illuminated. Rarely has an author presented such a wise and rich novel about our complex lives and times.
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"Dein Zimmer für mich allein": France (Maurice Nadeau)
Photo: Udo Leitner © Deuticke im Paul Zsolnay Verlag
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An SS man reflects on mass murder - and there's a pigeon hole for every vile deed. Novelist Georg Klein on the Holocaust and the enlightened harmony of trivial realism in Jonathan Littell's novel "Les Bienveillantes" which has just been translated into German.
The 400-page German translation of Jonathan Littell's corpse-littered SS novel,"Les Bienveillantes," has put the German-language feuilletons into a critical frenzy, despite the general consensus that the book is bad. We have compiled a selection of the accusations hurled. 
Kurt von Hammerstein was head of the Reichswehr, a grand seigneur, and an implacable opponent of National Socialism. In his new book "Hammerstein oder Der Eigensinn" (Hammerstein or idiosycrasy), Hans Magnus Enzensberger engages in dialogues with the dead to deliver a literary and lunatic precipitate of German history.
This literary autumn belongs to two Russian writers: Vassily Grossmann and Varlam Shalamov, whose epic works have been published in German at long last. But older Germans and German Romantics, Polish queens, Romanian Mannerists, combative atheists, Neopolitan Camorristi, Catalonian knights and a glutton of glorious abandon have also come up trumps.
The literary event of the season is the inexplicably delayed publication of two Russian masterpieces: Vassily Grossmann's historic drama of the 20th century "Life and Fate" and Varlam Shalamov's collection of tales from Kolyma "Durch den Schnee". On the German side, we have seen older novelists flexing their muscles and reaching for the skies, biographers looking up to bygone giants, and the feuilletons rallying to defend religion against the air strikes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. 
The novel is blooming in the Urals, where the children of the former technology elite are letting their imaginations run riot. By Sonja Margolina
Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk's book "Dojczland" is a sophisticated portrait of German-Polish relations with flights of sarcasm and a fine sense of grotesque. Doused heavily in bourbon, it's a controversial bestseller in Poland. By Thomas Urban
Romanian literature is still a tiny niche in the German book
market. Mircea Cartarescu's latest novel to be published here,
"Die Wissenden," shows readers what they are missing. A visit to
Bucharest to meet the man who is probably Romania's most famous author. By Jörg Plath
Come cruising in the park they say is dead. In his
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Rüdiger Safranski has pulled off the improbable: his book on Romanticism is a genuinely exciting account of German intellectual history. By Ulrich Greiner
Germany's book market is being flooded this autumn by biographies of dead male writers. Ina Hartwig examines the whys, wherefores and potential pitfalls of this latest literary craze.
The German Book Prize 2007, an annual award for the best German language novel, has been awarded to Julia Franck. Read an English excerpt of her book, "Lady Midday", and of the other five on the shortlist.