Uwe Johnson: Jahrestage 2

As I may have mentioned before I'm planning to read several monumental novels that I so far have avoided. This includes Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) and Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities), but I started out with Uwe Johnson's 4-volume novel Jahrestage (Anniversaries). I just finished volume 2.

You'll find an English description of this massive novel here.

As far as I know there has been only a partial translation published in English titled Anniversaries.

The novel's main storyline depicts an exact year of Gesine Cresspahl's life with her daughter in New York City in 1968 going day by day like in a diary. However, the novel goes back to tell the story of Gesine's childhood and youth in wartime Germany and in the Sovjet zone of Germany after the war. The second volume ends with the end of WWII in the flashbacks.

Although massive the novel is actually an easy read since the daily chapters are fairly short. Johnson goes in quite minute detail retelling the German history, while the 'present day' story very much relies on everyday observations of New York and the reports of each day in the New York Times. In this way you get an kaleidoscope image of 20th century history, somehow exemplified on the fates of a few protagonists, but never losing touch with the actual historic context.

Uwe Johnson: Jahrestage

This is a monumental 4-volume novel written by the German author Uwe Johnson between 1970 and 1983, the title in English is 'Anniversaries', although the German word also simply means the days of a year. As a teen I always planned to read this book, even though it was then not yet completed, and for years it was also quite uncertain whether Johnson would be able to finish the final 4th volume. He died only a few months after its final publication. So recently I started to collect the 4 volumes, and my copy of volume one is incidentally signed by the author. That's the book I'm currently reading.

You can find a very good description and analysis of the novel here

The synopsis from there reads:

The novel covers, day by day, a year in the life of Gesine Cresspahl, beginning 21 August 1967, and concluding 20 August 1968. Johnson anchors the narrative in the present-day, making Gesine a dedicated and somewhat obsessive reader of The New York Times, and so there are many references to the stories of the day, most every day, and often longer excerpts from the newspaper. At the same time, Gesine is providing a (more or less chronological) account of her past to her ten-year-old daughter, Marie, and there are also present-day domestic scenes from their lives.

The present-day plot of the novel is situated in New York City where Gesine Cresspahl lives with her daughter. However, the story (if you could call it as such) wanders back and forth through time and very much tells us about how Gesine's parents got married in Germany in the early 30s, her childhood all through the third reich, World War II, the occupation though the Sowjets and life in communist East Germany. This is all set against 'present-day' USA (i.e. in 1968) and engulfs the American history of that era, especially the Vietnam war.