The World at My Back (Biblioasis International Translation Series) - Softcover

Melle, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1771964510 ISBN 13: 9781771964517

Publisher: Biblioasis, 2023

Synopsis

"Books written out of great emotional distress are ... rarely great literature. Thomas Melle's [The World at My Back] is great literature because he pulls it off without a single false note."
—Deutschlandfunk (German National Radio)

Longlisted for the 2024 National Translation Award in Prose • A Finalist for the German Book Prize • Translated into Eighteen Languages

Addicted to culture, author Thomas Melle has built up an impressive personal library. His heart is in these books, and he loves to feel them at his back, their promise and challenge, as he writes. But in the middle of a violent dissociative episode, when they become ballast to his increasingly manic self, he disperses almost overnight what had taken decades to gather. Nor is this all he loses: descending further into an incomprehensible madness, he loses friendships and his career as a novelist and celebrated playwright, but the most savage cruelty is that he no longer either knows or understands himself.

Vulnerable and claustrophobic, shattering and profoundly moving, Thomas Melle’s The World at My Back is a book dedicated to the impossibility of reclaiming what has been lost, its lines both a prayer and reminder that, on the other side of madness, other possibilities await.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Bonn, Germany, Thomas Melle studied at the University of Tübingen, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Free University of Berlin. His novels Sickster and 3000 Euros were finalists for German Book Prize in 2011 and 2014 respectively. Melle is also a prolific playwright and translator. His translations from English to German have ranged from plays by William Shakespeare to novels by William T. Vollmann. The World at My Back, also a finalist for the German Book Prize, was a bestseller in Germany. It was made into a highly successful stage play, and has been translated into eighteen languages. Thomas Melle lives in Berlin.

Luise von Flotow teaches translation studies at the University of Ottawa School of Translation and Interpretation. Her recent translations include, from German, They Divided the Sky by Christa Wolf, and Everyone Talks About the Weather...We Don’t by Ulrike Meinhof; and, from French, The Four Roads Hotel by France Théoret. She has twice been a finalist for the Governor General's Award for Literary Translation.

From the Back Cover

"Books written out of great emotional distress are ... rarely great literature. Thomas Melle's [The World at My Back] is great literature because he pulls it off without a single false note."
—Deutschlandfunk (German National Radio)

Longlisted for the 2024 National Translation Award in Prose • A Finalist for the German Book Prize • Translated into Eighteen Languages

Addicted to culture, author Thomas Melle has built up an impressive personal library. His heart is in these books, and he loves to feel them at his back, their promise and challenge, as he writes. But in the middle of a violent dissociative episode, when they become ballast to his increasingly manic self, he disperses almost overnight what had taken decades to gather. Nor is this all he loses: descending further into an incomprehensible madness, he loses friendships and his career as a novelist and celebrated playwright, but the most savage cruelty is that he no longer either knows or understands himself.

Vulnerable and claustrophobic, shattering and profoundly moving, Thomas Melle’s The World at My Back is a book dedicated to the impossibility of reclaiming what has been lost, its lines both a prayer and reminder that, on the other side of madness, other possibilities await.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I would like to tell you about a loss. My book collection. It no longer exists. I lost it.

The topic came up during a dinner held in my honour to celebrate a small success. I didn’t feel comfortable attending this dinner but didn’t want to spoil the pleasure the organizers felt they were providing me with. All in all, it turned out to be a successful event.

Henry, who in real life has a much lovelier name, was sitting next to me. I’d had a crush on her for a while. We were talking in quite personal terms, but I had the feeling that this was as much due to her gentle, calm manner as it was to any real intimacy. We were talking about literature, as we often had before, and instead of putting on my best, somewhat false, front, I admitted I no longer owned a collection of books.

It was an impulse I simply gave in to: for some time I had been more open about my losses and failures, although these confessions always came with shame and stress. There is something pushy about exhibiting your own disasters; but not to do so is even weirder, when you’re already reaping the consequences. Bertram, the host, across the table, caught this comment of mine and we talked about the slow, steady increase in the size of book collections over the course of your life, and about the accumulation of stuff that, over the years, can become an important part of some people’s identities. We agreed that such a loss must be quite unbearable. Then the conversation fizzled out, and I turned back to Henry, to whom I still had to explain how my book collection had disappeared if I didn’t want to leave a sizeable gap in our conversation. And so, as though in a quiet aside, in a quieter tone than I usually use, but she herself speaks quietly and was hard to understand, especially as she was sitting to my left, which is the side affected by tinnitus, I told her I was bipolar. I reckoned she knew that already. Or she knew something. Everybody knew something.

The expression “elephant in the room” refers to a problem that is obvious and that is ignored. There’s an elephant in the room that you can’t overlook, but nobody talks about it. Maybe the elephant is embarrassing, maybe it is too obviously there, maybe people think the elephant will go away even though it is virtually squashing people up against the walls. My illness is such an elephant. The china (to let the elephant stomp through a second image) that he has trampled underfoot is still crackling under the soles of our shoes. But why talk of china? I’m the one who’s been trampled underfoot.

I was once a collector. Addicted to culture, I built up an impressive book collection over the years that I kept updating and expanding with a great eye for detail. My heart was in those books and I loved to feel all the writers who had influenced and inspired me at my back, and to have my contemporaries there too with their new publications, letting me feel time moving on and things changing. I hadn’t read all the books, but I needed them all. I could check references anytime or just get lost in a book, for the first time or all over again. My music collection had been just as impressive, indie, electro, classical. These collections had become part of my personality. It’s strange how you can project your self into the things around you. Still stranger to toss these things out without really wanting to.

In 2006, I sold the largest part of my collection, first of all the classical writers. Suddenly the much-loved books had become ballast the manic in me urgently had to dump. In 2007, during my depression, I mourned the loss terribly. A collector had scattered the objects he was passionate about to the four winds and there was no getting them back. For three years, I huddled amid my decimated collection and then went manic again. That was in 2010, and I sold off most of what was left of my truncated hoard along with all the CDs and records the dealers would take. I threw out the rest and got rid of a large pile of clothing as well. In 2011, I awoke from my delirium, emerged from the madness, and was dismayed at having lost and sold off everything I’d loved.

I still miss those books today. Usually I tell myself that even with a normal psychological constitution it would not have been all bad to trim down a book collection (but just trim it!) or that at some point I would have had enough of the constant archiving and hoarding and adopted a new, liberating minimalism, white walls, a sofa, a table with a Gerhard-Richter candle on it, nothing more. But the decisions I made were due to illness. Not free will. And the empty walls, the echo in my apartment still mock me today, and illustrate, to put it in radical terms, the destruction of an attempt at life.

Edition details

• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1771964510
• ISBN 13: 9781771964517
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320