Next World Novella

by Matthias Politycki, Anthea Bell (Translator)

Germany's master of wit and irony now for the first time in English.

Hinrich takes his existence at face value. His wife, on the other hand, has always been more interested in the after-life. Or so it seemed. When she dies of a stroke, Hinrich goes through her papers, only to discover a totally different perspective on their marriage. Thus commences, a dazzling intellectual game of shifting realities.

Genres: Fiction, German Literature, Germany, Novella, Novels, Literary Fiction, 21st Century

138 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2009

About the author

Matthias Politycki, born in 1955, has published over 20 novels and poetry collections. He is ranked among the most successful literary authors writing in German. His books have sold over 200.000 copies and have been translated into several languages, including French and Italian. Jenseitsnovelle was first published in German in 2009.

Reviews

[Baba · Rating 2 out of 5]

On the face of it, an interesting novella, about a novella! This was originally published in German. Hinrich comes across his dead wife, and finds a manuscript she has written, that takes a completely different look at what he thought was a good marriage. A pretty unmemorable tread, I'm a afraid. A Two Star, 5 out of 12 read.

2012 read

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Betrayer Betrayed

Death has a particular form of cruelty for the living - the impossibility of explaining one’s mistakes to the dead, and, therefore, of continuing to enrol them in the convenient fictions of one’s life. If death is also the moment when all mutual resentments are finally revealed, a point of total truth and and expression of all the secret fantasies never spoken about, it becomes a nightmare for the living. Jewish ethical wisdom summarises the situation neatly: it is the victim who needs to forgive transgression; but the dead have no capacity.

Betrayal can be a subtle art. It is most subtle, and most rationalised, when it occurs incrementally as a series of seemingly innocuous steps none of which can be called treacherous, but which taken collectively are decisive. The sin becomes all the more severe when the sequence of steps is in fact predicted by a draft fiction, written long before events, in which real intention is unwittingly stated. Found and edited by one’s spouse just before her death, her commentary makes that intention obvious. But, of course, this is not obvious to the perpetrator who can’t see his own crime - until, that is, he can no longer offer an explanation to the one he has betrayed.

The finality of death is most terrible because one can not convince the dead of anything. The fact that an explanation may be necessary is a potential source of embarrassment, rage and despair in the living. There is neither forgiveness nor forgetting. The threat is that one’s entire life has been a disastrously hidden lie which has been decisively and unanswerably exposed. An interpretation has been made. And the judgment is final. There is no appeal, no chance to ask for clemency, no mitigating circumstances are admitted. The brute facts have spoken.

Leaving draft fiction about for one’s wife to find is the pre-internet equivalent of publicly cataloguing one’s web site visits. Spiritually, we are our first drafts, or our web logs. It’s no use objecting that either are accidents, much less research. These things demonstrate intention, intention of which we may be only unconsciously aware. Consequent action is only incidental and dependent mainly on opportunity not virtue. Someone once said ‘if you want to know who you really are, look at your chequebook.’ This is no longer true since many of us no longer need them. But the sentiment is correct. It’s the hidden records of our existence that show who we are.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short book translated from the German. The author, Matthias Politycki, is one of the most successful literary German authors, but he's not well known over here in Canada. I think I first read of this book on the excellent book blog Kimbofo.typepad.com. Reading books in translation from other countries is like solo travelling, without a tour group but with an invisible tour guide. We get to meet the people, meet the natives. Everything is familiar yet different, seen from an unfamiliar angle.
The story is about a professor, married for many years, who finds his wife dead from a stroke. As he goes through her papers and writings, he discovers that their lives weren't as he thought. Same events, different perspectives. She was editing a manuscript he had started and abandoned years earlier, and wrote copious notes in it and around it. His wife's voice finally emerges from within his own writings. He finally listens to his wife, but it is too late.
"Being dead, he thought, means first and foremost that you can’t apologise, can’t forgive and be reconciled, there’s nothing left to be forgiven, only to be forgotten. Or rather there’s nothing to be forgotten, only forgiven." The big themes - the arc of marriage, the mirages we choose to believe in, communication and misunderstanding, death -- all in a slim binding of just 138 pages.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well known through Europe this is the German writing author, Politycki's first U.S. translation.It is offered by Peirene Press, who puts out short books, novellas, from Europe. Though he obviously writes well I found shards of random shaped cut glass littered on my green felt board resting on my table. Some were, sharp edged, dull, others bejeweled gleaming. None resonated with the possibility of shifting them together into a seamless jigsawed fashion. Frustrated, I looked down at my table, the green felt board they laid scattered upon and finally realized there was no way to place all these parts into a whole. Except for one. This was a brilliant idea which did not surprise me in that I must constantly fight humbleness and an annoying sense of humility. I turned the pieces over. Upside down. In this fashion there was a fit if not a locking fit. This new sequence referred to a dark humor and even if I could not lift my green felt board without the pieces sliding and slipping off, it was something.

Without these pyrotechnics I held the bones of a story where a passive professor found his equally passive wife dead in a chair from a stroke. He remained in the room for an exceedingly long time-the length of the book, fortunately no further-contemplating the passivity of his life in a passive way and the staid habits of his lengthy marriage. She being dead had little to nothing to say. Periodically he fidgeted with her body on the chair where she was at the time of death editing his recent manuscript. If I thought this was a bit dull I was in for a surprise. He had recently gotten laser surgery on his eyes and finally could actually see. This led him to spend hours in a local bar, sitting at a table on the periphery, fantasizing about a relationship with a barmaid, where even in the fantasy he was somewhat passive. Back in the room he finds what his wife has been editing was a long ago attempt at a short story by him, and a confession about her and their marriage written by her in the margins.

Not caring about the black humor, somewhat moved by what was he to do now about what she has written since she was dead, I thought both of them in essence as dead.

Yes the man can write. There were numerous opportunities for him to show it. However all he wrote about in essence were two characters who were passive and passive with each other. Yes this can leave one breathless if you are his wife , a corpse with rigor mortis, liver mortis setting in. Following the clean paths of passivity, if of little fun unless one has a particular fascination with stories which have the peculararity of no firm beginning and nowhere to end, is...well...dull.

The sad part about the writing was that this author came to the end of this story, non-story, and seemed to realize he wasn't anywhere. Rather then following the writing back and finding where he went off the track, where he unwittingly imposed what he wanted the story to be rather than what the material wanted to become, he tacked on an ending that was forced and as a writer naively juvenile.

Looking about the web there were some writers who agreed with me (Yes, a rare event.) Enjoying other novellas from Peirene Press, they thought this one ranked near-bottom on the list. So I will give two more novellas a try and clean my green felt board sifting the scattered pieces of glass into the trash.

[Antonomasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Least impressive of the eight Peirene Press translated novellas I've read so far. And among their first two years' publications, this was the one that initially sounded most intriguing: an elderly man's wife has just died, and going through her papers, he discovers writings that reveal many things she never told him. Peirene books are usually a little bit weird, different, unexpected. Next World Novella - also longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012 - was rarely so.

Meet Hinrich Schepp, yet another specimen of one of the commonest archetypes in recent literary fiction: the lustful male academic in late middle age. (I was already well and truly bored of these ten years ago, with Zadie Smith's On Beauty. Though there is the odd exception, preferably with humour, e.g. David Lodge.) At least, being in Germany, he can't live in Hampstead, or a similar part of New York, as his type usually does. And there are still some unusual and rather beautiful paragraphs, about his wife Doro's fears and visualisations about the afterlife, related to a painting in a Berlin gallery, and her own academic research on the I Ching. Both are Sinologists; I'm not sure if the term has unfavourable connotations now, but if it did, it would fit the old-fashioned atmosphere of the couple, their studies and relationship; they are 56 and 65 and the book was published in 2009, yet I kept having to remind myself it wasn't twenty or thirty years older than that - only a few details of modernity ever did. There are a couple of twists, which were quite predictable ways to vary a plot featuring this type of character. Then there is a character whom I suspect of being a lazy stereotype in modern Germany: a working class Polish waitress who has a tattoo of a Chinese character she doesn't understand, picked from a board in the tattoo parlour because she thought it would be sexy; she also steals from her work to send more money home to her parents and kid.

It was in a way satisfying to see the predicted twists develop. I enjoyed the novel-within-a-novel more than parts of the main story. Some of the writing during Hinrich's and Doro's early relationship was lovely, and also that near the end. Interesting details about drinking culture in Germany: e.g. table service; bars and cafes routinely staying open till 5am. I liked Doro's voice when she wrote at length. The writing was often better than the plot and than some of the cliched meanings behind the lines - but you'd hope so from Anthea Bell, one of the most widely respected German translators. Next World Novella wasn't all bad, at least.

[Saurabh Kadam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short German Novella by Politycki. Book scratches around many issues like Afterlife, marriage and infidelity. Our main character Hinrich who is 60 years old sinologist who is married to his wife Doro. I am not saying happily cause the book want us to think about they are happily married. He is ready to embark on a new affair with Dana a barmaid. He wrote all of these adventures in one manuscript which his wife found out and she edited the fictional character names with real characters. This edited manuscript is a sort of goodbye letter for her husband.
As both sinologists, They see life very differently. Hinrich sees the world as bland like how he forgot why he married his wife. On the other hand, his wife looks like a mystical journey like when she shows curiosity to the world for symbols, people's choice on symbols, afterlife. The reader will start to see cracks as the story progresses.
The novel explores themes like
how well do you know the person that you are married to?

Is there an afterlife where true love is united after their departure from this mortal shell?
The novel tells a love story about people who shows society that they are happily married to each other but they are not. Love and Death are really great mysteries for humans cause humans still do not understand this quite well. Haunting but beautiful story. 4.5*

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Last Note

I had not heard of Matthias Politycki, although he is apparently well known in Germany. But I do know the imprints of the Peirine Press, a series of shorter European fiction that all look worth reading; their publication of Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friederich Christian Delius was a special joy for me. So I was fully prepared to enjoy this one.

If only it hadn't been for that smell! As if Doro had forgotten to change the water for the flowers, as if their stems had begun to rot overnight, filling the air with the sweet-sour aroma of decay.

And so Professor Hinrich Schepp, the world's leading expert on ancient Chinese script, walks over to his wife Doro, who has fallen asleep at his desk, editing one of his manuscripts. Walks over to plant a kiss on her neck, and finds that she is dead.

It is not an academic paper that Doro is working on, but an unfinished short story of Hinrich's own, called "Marek the Drunkard," maybe intended as the tentative beginning of a novel, but long since discarded. She has been making marginal comments, at one point changing Marek's name to Hinrich. It is clear that she does not believe that this lame-footed romance between a bar waitress and one of her pathetic customers is fiction at all. And so, after moving his wife's body to the chaise, Hinrich Schepp reads on in growing horror.

As does the reader. To find that in a curious way, the two stories do indeed merge. Oh yes, the names are different, but without any typographical distinction, it becomes difficult to remember if one is immersed in the fact or the fiction, or if the so-called fact is itself a kind of fiction. What we are sure of is that we are reading a critique of a marriage, an apparently happy marriage of three decades, but also one in which a woman of talent and distinction has submerged herself in service to a mediocre man.

For Doro, at the time of her marriage, was a rising star in the Department of Sinology, and an aristocrat in her own right: Dorothee Wilhelmine Renate, Countess von Hagelstein. Her specialty was the I Ching, particularly those elements that concern ancient Chinese beliefs about death. She is fixated on the image of death as a wide cold lake that one must swim across to reach the other side. She and Hinrich fell in love in front of a painting in the Berlin National Gallery, a version of Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead that (though Politycki does not say so) at one time belonged to Adolf Hitler. She and Hinrich made a pact to wait for one another on the shores of that lake, so neither would have to swim it alone.

The title and this vow add another dimension to what might have been a clever but relatively trivial story of domestic rancor. We may now see it as taking place, not after or before death, but on the rim of death. And as certain features come back to repeat in the latter part of the novella, we notice subtle differences in detail that get us thinking. I don't believe the book has anything like the strength or importance of the Delius novella mentioned above, and am not sure whether its ending is profound or merely clever. But it is certainly intriguing, sadly true in its portrait of a marriage, and written at just the right length for maximum impact.

[Friederike Knabe · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If only it hadn't been for that smell…" Thus opens Matthias Politycki's Jenseitsnovelle [NEXT WORLD NOVELLA in the English translation]. On entering his study, Hinrich Schepp notices immediately "...that subtle sense of something Other in the midst of ordinary life, slightly skewing the morning." *) Did his wife, Doro, forget to change the water for the flowers? As he lets his eyes wander across the room to drink in the play of light and shadow from the autumn sunlight, he notices his wife sitting, as she often does, in his chair at his desk, editing whatever he wrote the night before. He is indeed a "happy man". But then, he had not written anything for years...
Like for a stage set Politicky describes the room with great visual impact. The reader looks over Schepp's shoulder and takes in the scenario and follows the husband's movements and musings. Expressing his feelings for his wife - I have always loved her - alternate with his reaction to the discovery of the manuscript she is "editing". The more he reads the more he finds her comments surprising, incomprehensible, and some are even offensive. Why write a biting critique on a manuscript he discarded years ago? What does she want to tell him? Doro has not moved at all: as he approaches to place his usual kiss on a particular spot on her neck, he realizes that... she is dead.

Politycki's novella delves profoundly into the questions of truth, pretend truth, smaller and larger lies and secrets, the alternate realities in the long-lasting marriage between two people who appear - or appear to Schepp - to have lived in a harmonious relationship. Well, yes, they don't have much to say to each other and, yes, he has been living a rather separate life since... Gradually, as Schepp reengages with his manuscript and reflects on the increasingly extensive and accusatory notes from his wife, another reality comes into view. However, Doro's comments on his text, while irritating Schepp immensely, provoke him to defend his behaviour, his mistakes, his indiscretions... but you cannot have a conversation or argue with a dead person...

Two intriguing themes are worth highlighting and that are, in a way, central to the story and connected in meaning. The first is Doro's intense preoccupation with the afterlife; her fear of dying, her vision of needing to cross a huge black lake before "dying a second time". Her husband, without any of these beliefs, had promised her even before their wedding to hold her hand when she reaches the shore of the lake. An ancient Chinese text, the "I Gin", has been studied by the couple, who are both Sinologists. One sign, "KHAN", representing water, abyss, but also fundamental change, attracts both in different and similar ways plays an increasing important role in their relationships. Without wanting to give any spoilers, or expanding into a philosophical discussion, the hints have to suffice.

The author is praised for his sense of humour and irony and in hindsight I can fully subscribe to this interpretation. His novella has some great surprises in store that make you reflect and go back to read some passages again for clues. For me, however, while reading it in German, the ironic side of writing does only come into its own two thirds into the story. Politycki also applies a somewhat unusual writing style for his protagonist that slows the reading initially. This stylistic feature would be impossible to recreate in English; Anthea Bell's excellent translation tells the story in a very smooth, fluid and accessible language.

*) all translations are from the English version translated by Anthea Bell.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Where his contemporaries succeeded, he stood aside. Luckily the details eluded him because he saw antying that was more than three to five metres away only in indistinct outline. Of course he noticed something was going on. He just didn’t let on, learned another language instead. And although at university he was at last considered a genius and quietly admired, he still always had to stand aside when the real prizes were handed out.”



What real prizes? That question becomes the theme to this story of Schepp and his wife Doro, two academics who teach Chinese history and whose marriage appears solid on the surface. Schepp serves as an anchor to Doro as she has a tremendous fear of death---she worries obsessively about possible afterlife scenarios. Doro, for her part, is a quiet and agreeable complement to Schepp’s genius, and they raise a family together quietly and in peace.

That is, until Schepp has eye surgery to better his eyesight. Suddenly, everything changes…quiet and peace are no longer enough: the change in his vision changes his entire outlook on life.

“It was terrible to see the world in such detail, so sharply outlined, all of a sudden! It had always been so comfortably impersonal in its remote milkiness; Schepp hadn’t felt he was missing anything. Now it dazzled him with a confusingly large number of details… Overnight life seemed like one long missed opportunity. If he had previously renounced a great deal, never complained, he was now determined to make up for it.”

The novel begins ominously, as he finds Doro dead in their study (not a spoiler, it’s stated on the back cover!). As shock sets in, he is strangely unable to take the necessary actions, and instead finds himself poring over her notes. The Doro he discovers in print was one he had never seen, although he’d lived with her for decades. Thus the concepts of sight, vision, appearance, and imagination all combine to make this a suspenseful read, from the reality of his dealing with her corpse to the mystery behind her hidden personality.

Woven into the story of this couple is another story, one that Schepp wrote in his spare time, “Marek the Drunkard”. It has its own suspense and ties in to Schepp’s life as he both writes the story and somehow unknowingly appears in it. The denouement of it, a manuscript that Schepp had kept hidden and was somehow now edited by Doro, creates confusion and another element of mystery. It begs the question, how much of a writer’s own intentions and wishes are put into their writing? How separate can a writer be from his characters? Was it a novel that he wrote, or a wish list? An alternate life?

As the terrible day of his grim discovery proceeds, a sense of anticipation builds. I found myself mentally urging him to call the coroner, to put the notes away, to get some air. Yet he’s locked into that manuscript and what she’s written…this new woman he hadn’t seen before.

“He was in such a state that he accused Doro to her face of deliberately distorting the facts, of malicious insinuation. Angrily he asked her why she always had to destroy everything, even in death! Now she had gone and spoilt even this sad day for him…”

A thought-provoking read, I wish it had been longer! In a practical sense, it made me never want to smell cut flowers again, and I certainly will make sure my pathetic short stories are password-protected.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is another novella longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and it’s a masterly example of the form. The theme is the disintegration of a marriage, but the plot and structure make it quite different to anything I’ve read before.

Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki is a clever title: it plays on Doro the wife’s preoccupation with the afterworld and Hinrich the husband’s alternate world, the one he plays around in when he’s not at home. There is also a fictional world of male fantasy, because although Hinrich is a mediocre Sinologist who writes academic stuff, he’s also ventured into the world of fiction.

His little novel is so forgettable that he forgets about it himself. It stays unfinished and untouched in an obscure drawer somewhere in the house. Or so he thinks, until the morning he wakes up to find that Doro has died – quite some time ago, it would seem – and was editing this little novel just before she died. And Doro is not the placid, complacent handmaiden to his ‘genius’ that he thought she was…

To read the rest of my review pleased visit
http://anzlitlovers.com/2012/04/09/ne...

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

[Andrew H · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliantly disturbing. In some ways reminiscent of Calvino. The perfect marriage of minds and bodies takes on different tones after the death of Professor Hinrich Schepp's wife. For a life time he has overshadowed her, though she was the better academic, then her sudden death, after a stroke, turns Schepp's life upside down as he realises his own rigor mortis. Schepp is a melancholic Hamlet, watching a play within a play, a fiction within a fiction, and a reader is left trying to unravel the strings of the death shroud. Politycki writes with irony and satirical bite as he leads forth a tragi-comic dance of death.

[MiMi · Rating 2 out of 5]

A short German story translated to English that touched on marriage and death. A good chunk of the story was about the main male character after finding himself in a sticky situation. The surprising things one may find about their belated spouse without judgement and awe in regard to the life they lived or thought they had lived. This was a very interesting way of writing. There were a lot of little pieces which made it difficult to keep straight; like the names of all the characters, time zone, and storylines. It didn’t make sense until the very end. And even then it was very anticlimactic. I can’t say this book made me interested in other works from the author unfortunately

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hinrich Schepp is a renown authority on ancient Chinese. He has been married for the past thirty years to Doro, a fellow Chinese scholar who gave up a promising career to be a wife and mother. With the children gone, they have a content but tranquil marriage, or so Hinrich thinks. He wakes up one day to the sickly sweet scent of decay and finds Doro dead of a stroke at her desk. A series of notes on a forgotten manuscript of Hinrich's reveals that not all was what it seemed.

Hinrich had had surgery several years previous to correct his vision. Since then, a new world had opened up to him of bars and social gatherings. He was never unfaithful to Doro, who remained home as he spent his evenings hanging with students or enjoying a flirtation with Dana, a Polish waitress at La Pfiff. Ironically, however, Hinrich is afflicted with another form of blindness: the inability to recognize Doro's increasing unhappiness as the wife who sacrificed and is rewarded by being left behind. He is also ignorant of the friendship formed between her and Dana in which his pathetic old-man foolishness was a recurring topic. The narrative starts to take an odd circular motion as people and events turn out to be linked in more ways than one. Hinrich's brief, aborted manuscript for a novel called Marek the Drunkard is an almost exact retelling of events at La Pfiff despite having been written before said events took place. Hinrich knows Dana who also knew Doro.

Throughout it all there is the recurring image of the dark lake you must cross after death. It appears to be a subdued place - "there are no colours, no smells, not a breath of wind, not a sound" - and so still as to be unreal. In the early days of their relationship, Doro had shown Hinrich a painting that she believed to be a portrayal of this lake of her nightmares. "Anyone could see, she said, that the painting was intended to be surreal; it skillfully kept its real subject hidden; the island was nothing but a reflection, an illusion that the painter had added as a kind of consolation." Dream, reality, and reflection blend into one another, as symbolized by the mystical body of water whose unreachable far shores promise renewal and whose immovability conceals the struggles of a swimmer. The short length of Next World Novella only reinforces its dreamlike atmosphere.

Although the thoughts and ideas raised by Politycki on life, death, relationships, and interconnectedness are poignant and beautifully unfolded, I still found myself not quite satisfied with the Next World Novella overall. I hate to say that it was because I could not identify with an older male protagonist and his marriage and mid-life crises - Hermann Hesse once described his Steppenwolf as being primarily concerned with the anxieties of middle age and I enjoyed that one immensely. But that seems to have been my issue, which is admittedly a very shallow one. So I'm left in the unusual position of appreciating yet not quite liking a novel yet still able to recommend it. In conclusion, I will say that Next World Novella will doubtlessly appeal to other readers and even if it does not, Mattias Politycki raises many thought-provoking subjects and invites a post-read meditation.

Original Review

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this 138-page novella in one evening and thoroughly enjoyed it. The book opens with Hinrich Schepp discovering the dead body of his wife Doro. She has been editing an old manuscript of his, a novel he started writing before they met and quickly abandoned. Through her scathing margin notes he discovers an entirely different side to her, and to their 29-year marriage.

So the story is told through his reading of the manuscript and Doro’s notes on it. The story of the aborted novel bears a striking resemblance to a recent incident in Hinrich’s own life, an infatuation with a waitress in a bar, except that in the novel version the male character is more heroic. As he reads Doro’s notes and corrections, he understands that she knew all about the things he thought he had kept secret.

Hinrich also thinks back to how he met Doro and their early life together, and so we get a wonderful insight into how relationships can change over decades. I loved how Hinrich’s laser eye surgery changed his behaviour, making him notice things in life that were blurred for so many years, things like the beautiful waitress in the bar with the mysterious I Ching character on her neck. The operation that was meant to improve his life ended up destroying his peace of mind, as he chased experiences he felt he’d missed out on before, and in reaching for things that were far away he lost the things that were close to him, like his intimacy and love for his wife.

There are a couple of nice twists towards the end that I won’t give away here. They contribute to the sense that this is a very carefully constructed novella, one in which more or less nothing happens in the ‘present’, other than Hinrich finding his wife’s body and reading the manuscript, but in which a lot of ground is covered in retrospect. Still it’s a thoughtful, meditative kind of book rather than a plot-driven one. The author has a lot to say about the nature of love and relationships, and says it very effectively. It becomes clear, for example, why Doro couldn’t talk to him about any of these things when she was alive – as he is reading, Hinrich at first denies and then rebuts and only in the end concedes the truth. I felt the intense sadness of Hinrich and Doro’s inability to communicate, and the way it erodes their marriage and turns love to hate. One of the twists at the end sheds a more positive light on this, but I promised I wouldn’t talk about it so I won’t.

[David Hebblethwaite · Rating 3 out of 5]

Matthias Politycki’s Next World Novella (translated from the German by Anthea Bell) is the latest title from Peirene Press, which would be enough on its own to interest me in reading the book, as I’ve enjoyed all their previous selections. Add to this that it’s a tale with shifting realities, and my interest only increases. Having read it now, though, it didn’t quite work for me, and I’m not sure I can put my finger on why.

Academic Hinrich Schepp finds that his wife Doro has died at her desk, where she has apparently been editing the attempt at a novel that he abandoned years before. Reading the manuscript, Schepp discovers that Doro’s edits constitute a commentary on their marriage, and that his wife was far from as content as he’d assumed.

The beginning of Next World Novella is especially potent, as the reader is a fraction behind Schepp in realising that Doro has died, and anticipates the jolt which is to come. There’s also effective interplay between the gradual unfurling of Doro’s true feelings and Schepp’s inability/reluctance to perceive the truth (e.g. he refuses to acknowledge the extent to which his abandoned novel reflected his own life). Yet I finished the book feeling that I hadn’t quite grasped something about it, and I can’t put into words what that might be. Next World Novella is well worth a look, though.

[Cheyenne Blue · Rating 5 out of 5]

A slow read, with rather ponderous prose, but it builds and twists, layer upon layer and it's not until the very end that you see that what initially seemed almost random and vague is all part of the tight helix of the story.

So very clever. The story of shadows and relationships lingered long after finishing.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 2 out of 5]

A German academic finds his wife has died of a stroke whilst editing an old manuscript he wrote before their marriage. This is the start of a series of twists and revelations, although ultimately it all ends up safe and secure and suitable for a Hollywood adaptation starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks.

[Nika · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would give this two stars, if not for the interesting way the story was constructed. The themes were intriguing and it was even kind of funny at times (and gross too), but I thought the characters were only tentatively shaped, extremely passive.

[Cathrine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tiny portals we step into
so many choices
guided by thought, desire, action
endless variations of consequences.
Who will you love?
Who will you focus on?
Why?

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

So there’s what he thinks happened, his fictionalised version of what he thinks happened (so, yes, a fictionalisation of a fabrication), what he imagines his wife thinks about what happened, what she appears to know about what happened and finally—finally!—we get to what actually happened (and what everyone actually knows) and what is now happening which is not what we thought had been happening at the start of this short but tightly constructed—you couldn’t call it ‘plotted’—novella. It starts slowly enough—just another German novella about loss and regret—but the next thing you know you’re in a page-turner with an unexpected and surprising ending.

The basic story is quite simple. It opens:

If only it hadn’t been for that smell! As if Doro had forgotten to change the water for the flowers, as if their stems had begun to rot overnight, filling the air with the sweet-sour aroma of decay. Schepp noticed it at once, that subtle sense of something Other in the midst of ordinary life, slightly skewing the morning.

[…]

Not only did he go to bed late, he also got up late, so if Doro had fallen asleep over her editing, wedged at an awkward angle between the desk and the chair as she was today, he would just shake his head, because he couldn’t have put into words all that he felt.

She’s not asleep and the smell has nothing to do with flowers. When I talked to my wife about the book the first thing she commented on—she having far more interest in science than I do—was the timeline: it normally takes two or three days for a body to begin to smell. In the case of his wife, Dora, livor mortis has started so she must have died at least six hours earlier but less than twelve since she’s a little stiff but he can still move her. But she shouldn’t smell. I never gave it a second thought but not all is as it seems. That could be the book’s subtitle—Not all is as it seems.

I’ve never woken up and found a dead body in my flat but if I did, after getting over the initial shock and taking a few moments to pull myself together the next thing would be to make the necessary phone call to our doctor. That’s what you do. You don’t leave dead bodies lying around the place. But what if there was a note? Well, if there was a note I’m pretty sure I’d read that before phoning anyone. And that’s exactly what Schepp does. It’s not a suicide note though—he doesn’t think for a minute that it is—but when he sees what it is she’s been writing on he can’t stop himself. She’s found and begun editing an old manuscript of his, his one attempt at a novel (all twelve pages of it, something he’d attempted about five years earlier) and, of course, he begins with the last thing she wrote before she died:

… turned into its opposite, the gentle wind above, the rejoicing lake beneath. ‘It is good to cross the great water.’ But without you, Schepp, do you understand, without you. As far as I’m concerned, and now I will say it once and for all, you can go straight to Hell! Along with Hanni and Nanni and Lina and Tina and
whatever they might be called. Your
I’m sorry, my head
suddenly hurts again,
like when I


Had Doro really written that? The spaces between the words became larger and larger, the rest was illegible, or no, at the bottom of the page, on the right-hand side, there was a little more in a shaky, entirely unfamiliar hand. It took Schepp some time to decipher it.
and now this too
well we’ll
talk about it

Hanni is the girl in the novel but who’re Nanni, Lina and Tina? And why is she calling him by his surname and not Hinrich? Morbid curiosity gets the better of him and so he gathers the manuscript together, goes back to the beginning and reads.

The novel, Marek the Drunkard as it was to be called, was based on things that really happened to Schepp. Of course as we writers do he’s altered the names but anyone who was there at the time would’ve seen through the patina of fiction and realised what he was reliving which is why it’s no great surprise when his wife at one point, beside the name Big Jörn she writes: “Oh, why not call him Hinrich and be done with it?”

Does she realise this isn’t a simple fiction? But how could she? Her involvement in the events that he’s trying to work out here was tenuous at least, a walk-on role, barely a cameo. She didn’t know anything; there was nothing to know. She hadn’t seen anything; there’d been nothing to see. Nothing had happened. A lot of hanging around waiting for something to happen had, but that was it. The sequence of events in Schepp’s head were always mostly in his head. He’s really to be more pitied than scolded but as he reads through the pages and his wife’s annotations and emendations he starts to see what happened in its true light and his wife in a new light.

This was well on its way to being a five-star review but then there’s that smell: you can’t forget the smell. Once he’s got to the end of his manuscript and his wife’s notes, once everything is laid bare where do we go from there? Well you have to go right back to the start of their relationship and his wife’s fears: what will become of us when we die? Is Schepp about to join her in death? That would be poetic. No, it’s not as simple as that. Personally I would’ve left the last chapter out. (Think Blade Runner: The Director Cut.) Impressive nonetheless—a unique approach to telling a story—and thought-provoking too.

Nice book trailer here. With live actors and everything.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tr Anthea Bell. Well this was a bit unexpected. The story is exactly as it says in the blurb but…. Succinct so read very quickly this is a look at a long marriage and the lack of communication that can happen even in (especially in?) such long term relationships. Not everything worked for me but I found the approach an interesting one and there was something very liberating about the wife’s actions. I am choosing to ignore the final chapter though - which is actually quite easily done but with apologies to the author if I have destroyed the ethos of the book...

[Marcel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hat trotz seiner Kürze ein paar Längen, insgesamt jedoch ist dieses Werk ein interessantes, klug konstruiert. Vielleicht schreit es allerdings ein bisschen zu sehr "alter weißer Mann". Das Ende gefällt mir persönlich sehr.

[Jinjer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hmm...I'm only giving this 2 stars because, although the concept sounded GREAT, I was bored to tears by the story unfolding in the manuscript. The rest of it was good. Also, I'm not completely sure I get the ending. And I don't know that I like being left confused. LOL

[Lydia · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 stars
This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife.
(It is you just suck)

[SamB · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really good read for a bank holiday when I could really concentrate on it and absorb the shifting realities and everything it had to say about relationships.

[Mark Staniforth · Rating 3 out of 5]

On an Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist which included three titles that swelled, respectively, to over six hundred pages, the inclusion of a contender from the London-based Peirene Press was quite a godsend.
Peirene have carved a reputation as masters of the novella form: they proudly boast on their website that they 'only publish books of less than 200 pages that can be read in the same time it takes to watch a DVD.'
Matthias Politycki's Next World Novella is, then, exactly what Peirene's loyal subscribers have come to expect: a shining example in the art of producing short, sharp, clever, thought-provoking fiction.
Too bad this year's IFFP judges did not see fit to include it on their final shortlist, especially given the nature of the final six. It did, however, make the shortlist for our 'Shadow' Prize, and quite right too.
'Next World Novella', translated from German by Anthea Bell, is a tale about the unravelling of a relationship. Hinrich is a professor of ancient Chinese literature who takes his role, and his life as a whole, rather for granted. He is at a loss one morning when he finds his wife, Moro, slumped dead at her desk from a stroke. Hinrich discovers Moro had excavated one of his long forgotten, swiftly abandoned attempts at a novel from among his papers, and had been ruthlessly editing it at the time of her death. Hinrich's novel is almost embarrassingly unremarkable, but Moro has also found in it a damning autobiography: a few name changes, and she has exposed secrets which Hinrich had always assumed he had kept hidden. In exposing Hinrich, however, Moro in turn also lays bare some secrets she herself has harboured, shredding their assumed relationship still further. In the saddest part, Moro, who is obsessed with death, reveals she will not keep their long-held pact to sail into the afterlife together, and would rather go alone.
This is a delicate, perfectly pitched, always engaging book which ends as intelligently as it started, with a lovely twist which will linger almost as long as the book took to read. At just 138 pages long, it sends a timely message to some of its fellow longlistees: when it comes to beautiful, translated fiction, size doesn't really matter.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novella is packed full of dark humour and twists.
Hinrich a successful professor comes home to find his wife slumped over one of his long forgotten manuscripts. As he reads her alterations to the script he realises that fiction has merged into fact as his obsession with a woman in a bar ,discovered by his wife echoes the story he has told.
Grief merges with rage in this weak yet vain man and we are drawn into the nature of betrayal, do vanity and delusional desire make a greater sin that actual adultery, especially when promises have been made at the outset of a long marriage.
I enjoyed its portrayal of the vanity of older men, and a wife's understanding of the weakness of her husband.
my only reservation was the ending, for me it slightly undermined the whole basis of the story. otherwise a good read.

[Magda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Serious but light and funny take on death, passing, illusions of love and disappointment. Enjoyed it a lot though it was not an easy read. Very much against the press's marketing slogan about reading their novellas for as long as a DVD takes. Not sure if I wanted to promote subtle, challenging stories by this, sounds a bit demeaning.

One more point: the book with its main character, really disappointing and mediocre man as it turns out, was very well received in the UK media while Julian Barnes and his Sense of Ending (of which I was reminded all the time when reading Politycki) was rather slashed. Wondering why? Is that not the stupefying effect of the British vs European/translated literature cliche?

[Snoakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a strange little book - it's kind of a meditation on love, life, marriage and death, but all wrapped up in the tale of one marriage. I liked the structure of a story wrapped within a story, and if it didn't really go anywhere, well, so what? Isn't that much like most long term marriages? A lot of what-could-have-been or might-have-been but mostly never-was? Because when we are comfortable, we stop striving so hard and relax into our companionable ways.

It did take me a while to get into it, but that's probably because I haven't had much reading time recently - it took me days to finish this something I'd normally devour in one or two sittings.