Uwe Johnson (1934-1984) grew up in the small town of Anklam,
Germany. He lived in New York City from 1966 until 1968 with his
wife and daughter. It was during that time that he began work on
Anniversaries. He died in Sheerness-on-Sea, UK, shortly after
Anniversaries was published, at age forty-nine.
Damion Searls is the author of The Philosophy of Translation. He
has translated some forty books, including, for NYRB Classics,
works by Patrick Modiano, Alfred D blin, Nescio, and Robert Walser.
“[Anniversaries] requires a hard chair, a fresh pen and your full
attention — for attention is its great subject . . . Searls’s
superb translation inscribes Johnson’s restlessness and probing
into word choice and the structures of the sentences themselves,
which quiver with the anxiety to get things right, to see the world
as it is.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
“Johnson’s book effectively gives the reader forty or fifty years
of world history and a single year of Gesine’s life, every day from
August 21st, 1967 to August, the 20th, 1968. Its scope is
startling, from the social organization of a small German town, to
Gesine’s work in a New York bank, to her father’s work as a master
carpenter, running a business in Richmond, in London.” —Tom
Sutcliffe, Saturday Review, BBC Radio 4
“I am absolutely stunned and slightly mortified that I’ve never
heard of this book before . . . I think it’s extraordinary, I think
it is a great late-modern masterpiece . . . How do you map Germany
in 1933 with Vietnam? But, he does it, he does it in the first
paragraph. It should be clunky or absurd or just slightly
embarrassing, but he does it brilliantly. It contains the whole
world. . . . I was completely gripped, and there are none of the
usual narrative handholds, there’s no romantic relationship, you’re
never quite certain why she’s on her own, who the father of the
child is—all of those props are not available to us, and still it’s
absolutely extraordinary.” —Kathryn Hughes, Saturday Review, BBC
Radio 4
“This book is truly a masterpiece. . . . It is a record, and an
enduring one for our whole post-Hitler era. You have actually made
this past tangible and—perhaps a much harder task—you have made it
convincing. Now I know how it was and is over there—know it down to
the tips of my toes. . . . This seems to be the only appropriate
way to speak and think: about great-grandmother and grandmother and
mother and child, in the interplay of generations and across two
continents.” —Hannah Arendt, February 7, 1972, Letter to Uwe
Johnson
“Uwe Johnson is the most incorruptible writer I’ve ever read,
always searching for what we so frivolously call the truth.
In Anniversaries he approaches this fundamental thing,
the truth, from different sides, across different continents,
across time. Page after page, we are shown how we need to see
clearly, without prejudice, to think properly. Page after page,
thinking with Johnson offers us the greatest of pleasures.” —Jenny
Erpenbeck
“Johnson has Balzac’s passion for the telling detail, the revealing
exactitude, here a passion that is impelled by the imagination of
love. So intensely are the figures imagined—Gesine and her
daughter, Gesine’s desolated mother, and all the tribe of Baltic
relatives who variously endure and resist the Nazi scourge—that the
ballast of Manhattan fact is needed to keep the book on the page,
the life in focus, to keep the agony from getting out of drawing.”
—Richard Howard
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