Simple Stories - Hardcover

Ingo Schulze

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330392697 ISBN 13: 9780330392693

Publisher: Alfred A Knopf, 2000

Synopsis

Ostdeutsche Provinz Anfang 1990. "Es war einfach nicht die Zeti dafür. Fünf Tage mit dem Bus: Venedig, Florenz, Assisi. Für mich klang das alles wie Honolulu. (...) In den dunkelgrünen Koffer packten wir unsere Sachen, in die schwarzrot karierte Tasche Besteck, Geschirr und Proviant: Wurst- und Fischkonserven, Brot, Eier, Butter, Käse, Salz, Pfeffer, Zwieback, Äpfel, Apfelsinen und je eine Thermoskanne Tee und Kaffee. (...) Sie müssen mal versuchen, sich das vorzustellen. Plötzlich ist man in Italien und hat einen westdeutschen Paß. Man befindet sich auf der anderen Seite der Welt und wundert sich, daß man trinkt und ißt und atmet und einen Fuß vor den anderen setzt, als wäre das alles selbstverständlich." Mit einer Pauschalreise zur "anderen Seite der Welt" beginnt das zweite Buch des Berliner Autors Ingo Schulze, der im Jahr 1995 für sein Debüt 33 Augenblicke des Glücks vielfach gelobt und ausgezeichnet wurde.
Mit seinem lakonischen, gänzlich unpathetischen Stil an die Tradition der amerikanischen Short Story um Cheever, Carver und Ford anknüpfend, erzählt Schulze scheinbar einfache Geschichten — was den Bewohnern der ostthüringischen Kleinstatdt Altenburg, eines in der DDR verfallenen architektonischen Kleinods inmitten von Uran- und Kohleabbau, in diesen "Simplen Storys" widerfährt, erschient auf den ersten Blick nicht weiter ungewöhnlich. Und doch offenbart sich in den vielen kleinen Alltagssbegebenheiten das Zusammenstürzen einer ganzen Welt, jener dramatische Bruch, der sich nach 1990 durch so viele ostdeutsche Biographien zieht.

About this title

Review

Ingo Schulze made his American debut in 1998 with 33 Moments of Happiness, in which he unearthed some memorable squalor, violence, frustration, and (yes) happiness amid the rubble of post-perestroika St. Petersburg. Now the author returns to his own stomping ground with Simple Stories, which takes place in an East German Podunk called Altenburg. At first this novel's 29 chapters appear to be a sequence of unconnected small-town vignettes. But gradually these narratives converge, producing a comical and cross-pollinated group portrait that's anything but simple.

What is simple, or at least simplified, is Schulze's style. The prose he unleashed in his first book was witty, ornate, and occasionally brutal--call it very dirty realism. This time he's produced a more deadpan work, whose whittled-down, first-person sentences are more akin to Raymond Carver than, say, Günter Grass:

It's Tuesday, April 7. Tom is celebrating his thirty-fifth birthday. Two years ago he inherited some money, and soon afterward Billi, his wife, inherited even more. They're living near Leisnig now, in an old farmstead built around a courtyard. Billi takes care of the twins and the garden and gives flute lessons. Tom is still turning out wooden sculptures--gigantic heads with gigantic noses--that he doesn't have to sell anymore.

And so it goes. The very flat, very American tone, which has been adeptly translated by John E. Woods, may be a deliberate mirror of Altenburg's watered-down and Westernized culture. It is in any case an effective vehicle for Schulze's tale, in which great and (mostly) small tragedies seem like aftershocks of Germany's own historical earthquake of the early 1990s. Revolution, the author seems to be saying, is all very well for its cosmopolitan fomenters--but will it play in the sticks? Simple Stories provides at least a partial and hardly pessimistic answer. --Ingrid Broun

From the Inside Flap

Prize-winning German writer Ingo Schulze's first novel, Simple Stories," is a marvel of storytelling and craft. Set in the East German town of Altenburg after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it deftly leaps among an array of confused characters caught in the crossroads of their country's history: a lovelorn waitress who falls for a visiting West German investor; an art historian turned traveling salesman; a former Communist official plagued by his past; an unsuccessful writer who asks his neighbor to break his leg so that he can continue to live on welfare.
Schulze skillfully intercuts an assortment of moving and comic vignettes about seemingly unconnected people, gradually linking them into an exhilarating whole of tidal unity and emotional force, until we see that all the time we have been reading a novel in glittering fragments, spun by a master. With a piercing eye for detail and a magical ear for dialogue, Schulze portrays the tragi-comedy of ordinary people caught up in the last great historical upheaval of the century.

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Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred A Knopf
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0330392697
• ISBN 13: 9780330392693
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304