Salman Rushdie – Languages of Truth
Salman Rushdie: Languages of Truth – Texts 2003-2020. C. Bertelsmann, Munich 2021. 480 pages, 26 euros.
For 17 days, Salman Rushdie suffered from a not entirely mild Covid 19 infection. The only new text in his collection of essays “Languages of Truth” reports on this experience. The other texts are primarily about existence as a polyglot intellectual who is less at home in one part of the world than in literature. Touching obituaries to Christopher Hitchens and Harold Pinter, declarations of love to Günter Grass and Philip Roth, reviews of his fatwa and his novel “Mitternachtskinder”. In a sense, this collection is a comprehensive introduction to the work and life of one of the most widely read authors of our time from his own pen.
Read here the detailed review by Alexandra Förderl-Schmid
Urs Stäheli – Sociology of Dewetting
Urs Stäheli: Sociology of Entnetting, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2021. 551 pages, 28 euros.
For many decades, networking was an ideal that was hardly disputed. Borders were seen as obstacles, both between states and between corporations and individuals. This euphoria has completely evaporated, the signs point to demarcation and retreat. The Swiss sociologist Urs Stäheli has examined this movement and presented a “sociology of delimitation”. The book takes a look at the arguments of networking critics, the thematization of networking and dewetting in social theory and, above all, the discourses and practices of dewetting itself. In doing so, the researcher encounters an interesting dilemma: How do you look at something that is explicitly Withdraws from consideration?
Read here the detailed review by Andreas Reckwitz
Zadie Smith – Grand Union
Zadie Smith: Grand Union. Stories. Translated from the English by Tanja Handels. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2021. 272 pages, 22 euros.
The British writer Zadie Smith has been one of the central figures of what was then still called “multiculturalism” since her first novel “Show Your Teeth”, which immediately became a world bestseller. In her new volume of stories and essays, “Grand Union”, she looks back on a decade of modern migration. The verdict is ambivalent, Brexit and the Trump administration form the background of the 19 texts gathered here, Smith inevitably tells primarily about the conservative resistance to globalization. But the volume also marks a change in the voice of this writer: Her lyrics have never been so thoughtful, so little on point.
Read here the detailed review by Meike Feßmann
Nasstassja Martin – Believe in the wild
Nastassja Martin: Believe in the wild. Translated from the French by Claudia Kalscheuer. Matthes & Seitz Verlag, Berlin 2021. 140 pages, 18 euros.
In the summer of 2015, the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin was attacked by a bear while working in Kamchatka. She wrote the book “Believe in the Wild” about this incident, a personal meditation on the relationships between culture and nature, fate and predestination, the self and the other. Martin describes how she accepts the beliefs of the Siberian people that she has researched up to then, the Ewenen, and how, in view of the serious injuries, the doctors can hardly explain that she survived the attack. We’re talking about a medical miracle. A book about a borderline experience that is also a borderline experience itself.
Read here the detailed review by Christiane Lutz
Albert Camus / Maria Cesarès – Write often and a lot. A love story in letters 1944-1959
Albert Camus / Maria Casarès: Write often and a lot. A love story in letters 1944-1959. Translated from the French by Claudia Steinitz, Tobias Scheffel and Andrea Spingler. Preliminary remark by Catherine Camus. Preface by Uwe Timm. Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg, 2021. 1564 pages. 50 Euros. E-book 39.99 euros.
The more or less discreet relationship between the married Albert Camus and the actress Maria Cesarès lasted for almost 15 years, and during all this time they wrote letters to each other. And although long-term relationships are often valued above all for the virtue of providing security and predictability, Camus and Cesarès seemed to be looking for the opposite in each other: chaos and turbulence. Thanks to the admirable work of three translators, the ups and downs, the injuries are now also visible in the German edition.
Read here the detailed review by Joseph Hanimann
Carla Del Ponte – I am not a heroine
Carla Del Ponte: I am not a heroine. Westend, Frankfurt am Main 2021. 176 pages, 18 euros.
Carla Del Ponte doesn’t want to be a heroine. But without the courageous demeanor of the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, many things in international law would be much worse today. With Slobodan Milošević, a former head of state had to answer for his war crimes for the first time. 90 defendants were found guilty in the Yugoslavia Tribunal. Del Ponte could be proud: “We had managed to put a stop to the impunity with which political leaders around the world had escaped their responsibility until then.” But their retrospect is also bitter, because there is not much progress in international law because two large states – the USA and Russia – are preventing much of the necessary progress out of self-interest. An important, an instructive book.
Read here the detailed review by Rolf Lamprecht