Aint No Right

He’s Back: Hitler Satire Tops Germany’s Best-Seller List

By Kharunya Paramaguru Feb. 10, 2013

What would happen if Adolf Hitler woke up in modern-day Berlin to find that it was not occupied by Russian soldiers but instead by a vibrant, multicultural citizenry? This is the premise of the debut novel by German journalist Timur Vermes, Er Ist Wieder Da (He’s Back), which has topped Germany’s best-seller list.

Narrated in the first-person by Hitler, the story follows the Führer as he awakens from a 66-year sleep in his bunker beneath Berlin to find an entirely changed Germany. In the celebrity-obsessed modern-day city, everyone assumes the fulminating leader of the Nazi party is a comedian in character — and soon he becomes a celebrity with a guest slot on a Turkish-born comedian’s TV show. His bigoted rants are interpreted as a satirical exposure of prejudice, leading him to decide to start his own political party.

The book, which has already sold hundreds of thousands of copies and is being translated into several other languages, including English, has unsurprisingly sparked debate in a country that has grappled for decades with Hitler’s unconscionable legacy.

Critics are ambivalent about the book. The newsweekly Stern described it as the “latest outgrowth of a Hitler commercialization machine that breaks all taboos to make money,” while a critic at the Hamburger Abendblatt saw it as a “successful if unsettling satire of a mass murderer and the mass media.”

Vermes appears happy to be stoking the debate. “[Hitler] is always the monster, and we can be comforted by the fact that we’re different from him,” he told German media. “But in reality, he continues to spark real fascination in people, just as he did back then when people liked him enough to help him commit crimes.”

At age six, Rodney Mullen was the family misfit who had to wear braces to straighten out his pigeon-toed feet. But by age fourteen, he was a world-champion skateboarder -- and for the next decade lost only one contest. Now, for the first time, Rodney tells the incredible story of his ascent to fame as the number one nerd in a sport where anarchy is often encouraged. Rodney learned to skate by himself on the family farm, his only company the wandering cows. As a teenager he traveled the world for demonstrations, invented the flatground ollie -- a trick that laid the foundation for modern street skating -- and in ten years garnered thirty-five world skating titles. While acing skateboard contests Rodney also earned straight A's in school, but his father forced him to abandon his fame and the fortune he could make from the sport he loved. Rodney was unable to stop for very long though, even after freestyle skating went out of fashion and the skateboarding world abandoned him. He adapted to street skating and eventually became one of the most innovative and influential skaters of all time. It's all here: everything from his eating and sleeping disorders to his comical experiences with loan sharks, occult-obsessed relatives, and the FBI. The Mutt is a look at Rodney's strange journey from penniless skateboarder to millionaire.

farrellgirl99 wrote:

jptm wrote:Say Larry, have you read anything from Michel Houellebecq? I think his stuff is right up your alley...

Les Particules élémentaires would be a good place to start.

chaos wrote:

farrellgirl99 wrote:

I got hooked on this book and read it in one sitting on a Saturday several years ago. I have read a couple of other books by Michael Cunningham, but nothing compares to The Hours. He does a fantastic job with his luminous prose, intricately weaving together the narrative strands and observational details of his slowing unravelling characters.

nausearockpig wrote:I just finished this:



It was somewhat disconcerting hearing that he was murdered as I was reading the book he wrote...

Larry B. wrote:Hey! I hadn't heard of him before. I just checked my collection of e-books and I do have that book and Platform. I'll give your recommendation a go!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 28300.html

Updated March 31, 2013, 10:14 p.m. ET
'Finnegans Wake' Is Greek to Many; Now Imagine It in Chinese
Translation of Joyce Novel in Works for Years Sells Well to Readers Craving a Challenge

BEIJING—"Finnegans Wake" has bedeviled readers for decades, but few can claim the toil and triumph it has given to Dai Congrong.

Ms. Dai spent eight years translating into Chinese the 1939 James Joyce novel that the author's own brother described as "unspeakably wearisome." She endured low pay, a skeptical husband and the continued demands of her teaching job. That is on top of deciphering sentences like this: "Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface."
...
A newly affluent nation that prizes black Audi sedans and Louis Vuitton handbags has made a literary status symbol of what may well be English literature's most difficult work. Thanks in part to a canny marketing campaign involving eye-catching billboards and packaging, "Finnegans Wake" sold out the first, 8,000-volume run shortly after it was released in December. The book briefly rose to No. 2 on a bestseller list run by a Shanghai book industry group, just behind a biography of the late Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China's modern-day boom.
...
The appetite for Joyce's most challenging work comes from a real hunger for demanding literature. A Chinese writer, Mo Yan, last year won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first for a Chinese national. But his victory only underscored China's lack of a global profile in the printed word. Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution suppressed China's rich literary heritage. Continued government censorship and the lack of emphasis on reading for pleasure in the schools haven't helped.
...
"Finnegans Wake" famously begins midsentence. It defies conventional narrative structure. It offers 10 different words referring to thunder, each at least 100 letters long, such as "bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunn-
trovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!" Experts are still arguing, but many believe it takes place during a shifting dream or dreams, and it involves among many other matters a bar owner and his family and an unspecified sexual transgression in a park.

chaos wrote:This is a just a FYI (I haven't read the original version, let alone the one in Chinese).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 28300.html

Updated March 31, 2013, 10:14 p.m. ET
'Finnegans Wake' Is Greek to Many; Now Imagine It in Chinese
Translation of Joyce Novel in Works for Years Sells Well to Readers Craving a Challenge

BEIJING—"Finnegans Wake" has bedeviled readers for decades, but few can claim the toil and triumph it has given to Dai Congrong.

Ms. Dai spent eight years translating into Chinese the 1939 James Joyce novel that the author's own brother described as "unspeakably wearisome." She endured low pay, a skeptical husband and the continued demands of her teaching job. That is on top of deciphering sentences like this: "Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface."
...
A newly affluent nation that prizes black Audi sedans and Louis Vuitton handbags has made a literary status symbol of what may well be English literature's most difficult work. Thanks in part to a canny marketing campaign involving eye-catching billboards and packaging, "Finnegans Wake" sold out the first, 8,000-volume run shortly after it was released in December. The book briefly rose to No. 2 on a bestseller list run by a Shanghai book industry group, just behind a biography of the late Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China's modern-day boom.
...
The appetite for Joyce's most challenging work comes from a real hunger for demanding literature. A Chinese writer, Mo Yan, last year won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first for a Chinese national. But his victory only underscored China's lack of a global profile in the printed word. Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution suppressed China's rich literary heritage. Continued government censorship and the lack of emphasis on reading for pleasure in the schools haven't helped.
...
"Finnegans Wake" famously begins midsentence. It defies conventional narrative structure. It offers 10 different words referring to thunder, each at least 100 letters long, such as "bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunn-
trovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!" Experts are still arguing, but many believe it takes place during a shifting dream or dreams, and it involves among many other matters a bar owner and his family and an unspecified sexual transgression in a park.

nausearockpig wrote:that was a really good read.