In the continuing story of my beautiful friendship with German literary culture, I am happy and honored to report my participation in the 2008 Krautgarden literary series, comprising two sets of readings by young German and American writers, on March 7 at the “Krautgarden Loft” in Chinatown (New York), and on March 14 at Leipzig’s Baumwollspinnerei, former site of the Continent’s largest cotton mill.
Could the world survive one more day without learning the further developments in the story of my beautiful friendship with the German literary establishment? I thought it was safer not to find out.
Why exactly am I so popular in Germany? I actually wrote about this phenomenon—the literary “big in Japan” effect—in my article about Franco Moretti (forthcoming, as “Abenteuer eines Mannes der Wissenschaft,” in a German-language n+1 anthology by Suhrkamp Verlag). It sometimes happens that works virtually unknown in their country of production become inexplicably popular, or even canonical, in some other national literature.
In my article, I mentioned the example of Michel Zévaco’s Les Pardaillan: a family saga beloved by many Turkish schoolchildren of my parents’ generation, but completely unknown to any of the French people I asked, and also unknown to the former chair of the Stanford French and Italian department, who is not French but has written a well-received book on Proust.
A while after my article came out, I even received an email in Turkish from a student who was preparing for the TOEFL, and wanted me to help her locate an English translation of volume 2 of Les Pardaillan. (She had already read vol. 1 in Turkish.) As far as I could determine, there is no English translation.
In short, Michel Zévaco is truly, by near-unamious international standards, a D-list writer, who has somehow made it onto the Turkish B-list; and I feel a certain affinity with him in that, while I remain totally unheard-of in my native USA, I am slowly but surely working my way onto the German literary C-list. In the continuing saga of the Teutonic demand for my literary services…
I was recently delighted to learn that my dear friend, the teen fiction sensation Lauren Mechling, now has a blog where you can read about her pursuit of flawless social functioning, and also about the time she spilled a cup of coffee on famous actor Jeffrey Tambor and didn’t feel bad about it. After spending an enjoyable half hour poking around Mechling’s website, I made an amazing discovery about our shared past. “My mother,” Mechling writes,
Because of my abiding interest in our nation’s youth, I was really happy to meet Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and his girlfriend Sara last month in San Francisco.
Here is a picture where you can see how charming they looked, with their scarves, and also their entrance stickers from the Asian Art Museum. That is a Polo logo on Koenig’s sweater, BTW… but before you go starting the hateration machine on him I just want you to stop for a minute and ask yourself: WIKDI?
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