A couple of weeks back, Apostoloff-author Sibylle Lewitscharoff gave one of the prestigious 'Dresdner Reden' and chose as her topic Von der Machbarkeit. Die wissenschaftliche Bestimmung über Geburt und Tod (warning ! dreaded pdf format !) (very roughly translated: 'Concerning feasibility: the scientific determination of birth and death' -- yeah, just the kind of stuff you want to wade into as an author ...).
The proverbial shit hit every fan in the German-speaking countries, and the literary pages have been filled with this for weeks now -- but, save Apostoloff-translator Katy Derbyshire discreetly (but emphatically) distancing herself from the author there's been essentially no English-language coverage -- until now, as Philip Oltermann weighs in in The Guardian, suggesting Why Sibylle Lewitscharoff's case for a new puritanism lacks substance.
A decent overview of the mess -- though it really doesn't convey just how huge this has been in Germany -- and Oltermann sums it all up a bit too nicely and easily (in noting, for example: "Lewitscharoff's literary mode: a preening, self-caressing style marked by an almost baroque love of wordplay"). Similarly, one might well agree with his conclusion but it feels a bit too self-satisfiedly dismissive, too:
A decent overview of the mess -- though it really doesn't convey just how huge this has been in Germany -- and Oltermann sums it all up a bit too nicely and easily (in noting, for example: "Lewitscharoff's literary mode: a preening, self-caressing style marked by an almost baroque love of wordplay"). Similarly, one might well agree with his conclusion but it feels a bit too self-satisfiedly dismissive, too:
Both Lewitscharoff and Mosebach may imagine they are issuing a rallying call for a new puritanism, but their diatribes come across as the decadent moaning of a powdered intelligentsia.Still, good to see this get some attention outside Germany, too -- and I wonder how it will affect her future-in-translation (Apostoloff seems to have been a bit of a dud -- with an Amazon.com sales rank of 1,233,033 as I write this). Worth noting, too: Der Mond und das Mädchen-author Martin Mosebach, whose fiction is quite admired in Germany, has made practically no inroads into the English-language market (though interestingly Apostoloff-publisher Seagull is set to publish his What was Before this fall).