الأقمار الساكنة

by Clemens Meyer, سمر منير (ترجمة)

Geschichten aus der Nacht. Clemens Meyer ist ein Meister der Kurzgeschichte.

Ein Lokführer, der die Nachtfahrten liebt, bis ein lachender Mann auf den Schienen steht. Ein Wachmann, der seine Runden um das Ausländerwohnheim dreht und sich in die Frau hinter dem Zaun verliebt. Ein Imbissbudenbesitzer, der am Hochhausfenster steht und auf die leuchtenden Trabanten der Nacht schaut. Souverän, rauschhaft und traumwandlerisch sicher erzählt Clemens Meyer von verlorenen Schlachten und überwältigenden Wünschen. Es sind Geschichten aus unserer Zeit, so zerrissen wie unser Leben, so düster wie die Welt, so schön wie die schönsten Hoffnungen.

Genres: Short Stories, German Literature, Fiction, Germany, 21st Century, Contemporary, Literary Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Meyer was born in 1977 in Halle an der Saale. His studies at the German Literature Institute, Leipzig, were interrupted by a spell in a youth detention centre. He has worked as a security guard, forklift driver and construction worker before he became a published novelist.

Meyer won a number of prizes for his first novel Als wir träumten (As We Were Dreaming), published in 2006,[2] in which a group of friends grow up and go off the rails in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He received the Rheingau Literatur Preis in 2006.

His second book, Die Nacht, die Lichter (All the Lights, 2008), was translated by Katy Derbyshire and published by independent London publisher And Other Stories in 2011.[3] It won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2008.

Since then he has published his third book, Gewalten (Acts of Violence), a diary of 2009 in eleven stories, and a second novel called Im Stein (In Stone) in 2013 which was long-listed for the German Book Prize.

Reviews

[Patrizia · Rating 4 out of 5]

In un tempo sospeso, in cui il Gegenwärtig (il presente, l’attuale) è un concetto relativo, direi mobile, e il passato incombe nel ricordo recente di una Germania divisa in due, si muovono i protagonisti di questi racconti. Ritratti frammentari di vite che hanno conosciuto la guerra, l’occupazione, l’odio. La caduta del muro, nel 1989, ha chiuso un capitolo, ma riunificato forse solo apparentemente un popolo che ha vissuto in maniera totalmente diversa il dopoguerra, la cui stessa lingua ha avuto un’evoluzione diversa.
Con un linguaggio secco, ma non aspro, lucido e perciò più coinvolgente, Clemens Meyer descrive solitudini, esistenze al margine, amori rimpianti, avidità, paura. Un’umanità varia, sperduta in un mondo che “è andato a ramengo dappertutto”, ma che ancora spera, nonostante tutto.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another Fitzcarraldo book I missed out on at the time of its publication, this is an impressive short story collection that explores the lives of ordinary and often marginalised people in the former East Germany. Many of these stories are impressionistic and a little elliptical, and all are to some extent haunted by the past.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some time ago, I read and loved Meyer’s Man Booker International listed “Bricks and Mortar” and his short story collection “All The Lights”, so I was excited when my Fitzcarraldo subscription brought this new collection of short stories into my house. There is something about the way Meyer writes to which my brain responds in a very positive way. I know this is not the case for everyone, but it definitely works for me.

Die Stillen Trabanten comes to us in English as Dark Satellites, translated by Katy Derbyshire who also translated the other books by Meyer that I have read. The “satellites” refers most directly to the setting of the stories in the satellite towns that spring up around large German cities. But it can also be understood to refer to the people we meet in these stories as the loneliness of characters brings them into one another’s orbits, sometimes for a fleeting encounter, sometimes for a longer period.

It has to be said, it can sometimes be quite difficult to know exactly how long a story lasts for because Meyer has scant regard for chronology. Or realism. Many of the stories have several different timelines running in parallel, but the narrative feels no requirement to tell you when it is switching from one to another. Similarly when characters slip into dreams or imagined conversations. As the book itself says

Sometimes you lose yourself in time, you know, and it takes a few seconds to work out where you are.

All of the stories are about encounters of some kind or another. The book is organised into three sections of three stories each with each section introduced by a very short initial story (these are called One, Two and Three). So, a total of 12 stories telling of 12 encounters. Almost: the final story is very different to the other 11 and mixes the real-life Willi Bredel escaping Nazi Germany with a narrative about the real life 14th century privateer Klaus Störtebeker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_S...). I have to admit, this final story left me rather confused and it probably needs at least one re-read!

That final story aside, we start with a very short piece in which workers are asked to stop work and are directed into a patch of woods where they find people gathered round the body of boy who has died, possibly from eating a poisonous flower. That is the extent of the story and it gives you a clue that not everything will be explained as you read. In the next story, a guard in Unit 95 (Broken Glass in Unit 95) recalls an intense affair with a refugee woman. Then (Late Arrival) two women form a friendship over bottles of wine in pub in a train station (there are lots of train stations through the course of the book).

The mixed timelines combine with the lack of boundaries between real and imagined and with the open ended nature of many of the stories to create a powerful atmosphere. Meyer has a way to expose people’s fears and concerns that makes you want to do something to help them.

This is the kind of book that makes you look at strangers in a different way. I like it when a book changes the way I behave, even if it might be just for a while until the effect wears off. In the couple of days I spent reading this, I found myself wondering about the stories strangers would tell me if I talked to them: I noticed other people more than normal.

I think that’s a good thing and I’m glad I read the book. I’d like to give it 5 stars, but I need to get to grips with that final story before I can do that.

[Matthew Ted]

112th book of 2021.

This is an older Fitzcarraldo publication from back in 2020, one I didn't get at the time but as I wait for their new releases I am also backtracking with their products. Their newest, Dark Neighbourhood didn't reach me, lost in the post somehow, and so I settled with the similarly titled, Dark Satellites. Meyer is apparently at the top of the game in contemporary German literary fiction, and this collection proved some serious narrative skill. The stories are all disorientating, disturbing in some way, with ethereal like prose. I've often seen it described as 'impressionistic' and this is a good word for it too. Meyer's stories float around in time with no tags or warning, paragraph to paragraph we are thrown into a character's past, present or future and often the writing is so abstract that we lose the thread of the narrative itself; but reading, we get the impression that this isn't necessarily a problem. Losing ourselves in the narrative feels like part of the experience of the stories, which are all centred around German satellite towns, strangers meeting and becoming friends and then parting. "The Distance", one of the stories identified on the blurb, is about a train-driver who hits a laughing man on the tracks. It then unravels into the narrator's own childhood watching trains go-by, into the present as he searches for the man's wife. I've left it unrated because trying to rate stories like these feels doubly arbitrary; Meyer writes stories that are confusing, boring, unsettling and awe-inspiring all at once. I wouldn't readily recommend this to many people but from a writing point of view alone, it is a masterclass lesson in using time and the short story form.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 2 out of 5]

The night before last – so yesterday, no, the day before? – she was a little confused because the days and nights were flowing together more and more

Bricks and Mortar, translated by Katy Derbyshire from Clemens Meyer’s German-language original, featured on the longlist of both major translated-into-English fiction awards: the 2017 UK Man Booker International and the 2019 US Best Translated Book Award.

The translator herself described it as her favourite translation to date and a a playful, ambitious, neo-modernist, Marxism-tinged exploration of the development of the east German prostitution market, from next to nothing in 1989 to full decriminalization and diversification in the present day. but adding Not everybody’s cup of tea., and unfortunately the brew wasn’t to my taste. I admired the literary ambition and the translation but didn’t enjoy the reading experience. From my review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

We’re not always clear who the narrator is and even within a given narrative points of view and times shift. Characters “reminisce” about the future (later someone got shot there, but I had nothing to do with that. I can't know about that yet.) and drop seamlessly into the past, we’re often clear if the events described are happening or imagined, even at time if the characters are alive or dead, or indeed dead but now alive again.

The issue I has is that there are two ways to read this type of book. Either read it very carefully, cross-referencing back to piece together the story, or let the polyphonic voices wash over you. The problem either way the book is 400+ pages too long – my interest level was waning after 200 pages.

Dark Satellites is a short-story collection from the same author/translator/publisher (another of Fitzcarraldo Editions’s wonderful blue books) combination, from the 2017 original Die stillen Trabanten.

The stories are presented in three groups, each with a brief mood-setting piece of 2 pages, followed by 3 more substantive (15-30 pages) stories. The characters and settings of each are distinct, but share a common focus on the marginalized, typically living in the dark, satellite towns of the title, in the former East Germany: a security guard on night patrol near to a refugee centre, a train cleaner who befriends a hairdresser at the station where they both work (Granta reproduced this story https://granta.com/late-arrival/), the owner of a small burger bar, a freight train driver.

There is a flavour of Wolfgang Hilbig to the settings - the following passage could have come straight from the Tidings of The Trees/Old Rendering Plant/The Females novellas:

An old man sitting on a park bench told us about the open-cast mines in the lowlands around the town, gigantic craters where once excavators ate away at the brown coal like lindworms.

Unfortunately though I just, again, didn't connect with this - and indeed it rather suffers from the comparison to Hilbig.

The shorter length makes for a different reading experience to Bricks and Mortar and, dare I say, a book that is less formally ambitious. But the shifting sense of time is a common and distinctive feature, with the characters themselves often confused about reality versus memory (the present is nothing says the narrator of the title story). This sense starts with the first lines of the first story, ‘Broken Glass in Unit 95’:

The nights were dull and endless, started at six and ended at six, they were like dark days that touched in the middle, and when they stopped being dull they got even darker and more endless and we wished we were bored again, hours half-asleep between our inspection rounds, our heads never allowed to touch the table top, we’d doze sitting up, but Unit 95 had become unpredictable and some of us had got unpredictable too and lost our nerve and got taken off the job, but I tried to stay calm, I knew the new part of town, the satellite town where Unit 95 was, I knew the nights when people went crazy, I’d been working in Unit 95, been doing my rounds all over town since the mid-nineties, I knew the hostels the other guys sometimes called ‘roach motels’, where the asylum-seekers lived, no one had ever liked working shifts there, and now it was all getting even worse.
…
I started my round without the dog, like I always did. It was still almost light and the dog had hip problems like most of the work dogs, he was an old Belgian Shepherd, well trained but with a slight limp, the onset of HD, hip dysplasia, and I didn’t take him on my round until after midnight. He stayed in the security cabin until then and rested. Our cabin was right next to the road on a grass verge and the light was on from six till six – you couldn’t turn it off – so everyone could see us. A security guy and a dog in a glowing Plexiglas cabin, and outside, the night.
‘One to Twelve, One to Twelve, come in, over.’ I unclipped the radio from my belt. It was heavy and much too large and a better weapon than the rubber baton I also wore on my belt. The radio was a relic from another era, we had mobiles and smartphones and all that crap, but the radio sent out beeps and white noise in the frequencies of the night, it spoke to us through time and space as I saw her again that night in Unit 95.
But it wasn’t her. How could it be her, unchanged and so young, after more than twenty years?
‘Twelve, go ahead.’

I started my first round without the dog. It was autumn. I touched the first magnetic tag against my guard patrol reader. A low beep. I put the black device back into the side pocket of my uniform jacket; it looked like an electric shocker. The walkie-talkie crackled and began to speak, and I heard the voice of the old dispatcher back at base, far away from the satellite town, on the western edge of the town proper, out of which the satellite town grew like... days that... I shook my head, too many rounds, too many shifts over the past few weeks.

The final story is something of an outlier, being based on the real-life German communist and writer Willi Bredel (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willi...) an his contemporaries such as Johannes Becher and Alfred Kurella, who all escaped Nazi Germany for the Soviet Union and later returned to senior positions in the DDR, and the tale is combined with the legendary 14th century privateer Klaus Störtebeker. I wasn't entirely sure of the connection, but I think Meyer's point is to have them look forward to creating a new, Communist Germany, with a flash forward at the end to the grim reality of what this country was to become - back to the dark satellites and lignite mines.

There's just something about Meyer's writing that doesn't click for me. I can admire it, and it has many similarities to authors I love (notably an explicit influence from Hilbig) but I find the writing something of a slog: it's a worrying side when one looks forward to see how much more there is to go in a 20 page story.

2.5 stars - but I would still recommend it to others.

[Brendan Monroe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I must confess — I do judge books by the cover. I don't see how you can't, really. A cover can tell you so much about a book.

You know exactly what you're getting if the cover shows a shirtless man, the head of the woman in his arms thrown back in seeming ecstasy.

Italians refer to mystery novels as I libri gialli (yellow books) because mysteries there have long been identified by their yellow covers and spines.

When I learned via an article in the New Yorker some years back that Peter Mendelsund, a professional cover artist, was designing a series of covers for new editions of several Italo Calvino classics, I just had to have them, despite the fact that I had many of the same titles already.

I just love a book with a good cover.

Which brings me to the UK publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. There is no cover art for the books they release. Non-fiction books receive an all white cover, while novels and short story collections receive an all blue cover.

I absolutely love this, not just because deep, solid blue and solid off white make for lovely covers, but because they reveal nothing about the story. I don't know what I'm getting into when I get a book in the mail from Fitzcarraldo Editions and that sense of the unexpected, especially in a day and age when surprises are so few and far between, is something I revel in.

The only thing left to decipher then, without opening the book or reading the jacket, is the title — the other thing I unapologetically judge books by.

"Dark Satellites" is a somewhat cryptic title in itself. Is it referring to satellites that orbit the earth? To satellite cities?

Most, if not all, of these stories take place in post-USSR East Germany. The exact setting of these stories is never disclosed, or if they were, I certainly missed it.

"Dark Satellites" is riven with echoes of other authors. The way the author, Clemens Meyer, plays with memory couldn't help but evoke W.G. Sebald, and certain stories, particularly "The Beach Railway's Last Run" brought to my mind the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig.

A sort of languid melancholy pervades many of these stories, several of which feature or take place in dilapidated Soviet-style apartment buildings. I saw nothing bright when visualizing these settings and characters, no greens or yellows, no light blues. Instead, the entire collection is muted, set in somber, dark tones of concrete and eternally overcast skies.

The great Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski would be my choice to helm an adaptation of this collection. His unforgettable series of ten films based on the Ten Commandments, each an hour long, each set in the same Warsaw apartment building, each drained of color, felt closely related to many of the stories in this collection.

Here Meyer has turned his eye to the new Germany, and the present does not appear bright. Meyer's stories feature characters who are all stuck in the past, who are all — old and young alike — living at the end of their days. The future doesn't exist and the present is as cloudy and unclear as the East German sky on a winter's day.

All these characters have is the past. They live on the outskirts of life, in their "Dark Satellites," slowly orbiting around strangers who, without warning, spark some memory inside of them. They don't feel. They just sometimes remember what it had been like to feel.

All of these stories made me feel. Some more than others. The title story was my favorite of the collection, a man's memory of a love affair with the wife of his conservative Muslim neighbor. The aforementioned "The Beach Railway's Last Run" was another favorite. That story, set in the waning days of World War II, felt like it was set somewhere else, in a part of Germany the darkness had not yet reached.

In "The Distance," a train driver hits a man on the tracks and he's sent backwards, as all the characters in these stories are, to wonder about the life of the man he struck, and in the process examines his own.

Trains run through many of these stories, a potent contrast to characters who don't feel like they're going anywhere. They're well aware that Germany has changed, that it's changing still, but they're immobile all the same.

They're stuck in a permanent state of present uncertainty, while their minds are turned to the romanticized past.

[Abbie | ab_reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75 stars

(#gifted @fitzcarraldoeditions) I read Dark Satellites, a collection of short stories from German author Clemens Meyer, translated by Katy Derbyshire, pretty much over the whole month of January and I have to say it didn’t help with my January blues - but in a good way, if possible! I came away from this collection with the overwhelming sensation of isolation, as Meyers explores the fringes of German society in these bleak stories.
.
Dark Satellites is a collection of haunting chance encounters with strangers, which lead to everything from love and friendship to dark secrets and guilty admissions long kept buried within. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to go and strike up a conversation with a stranger; that makes you look at everyone you pass differently, wondering what stories they’re holding inside of them.
.
One of my favourites was The Crack, a feverish tale of a man who comes home from work to find his flat has been broken into. He feels suddenly dislocated from his life, as if the thieves have stolen his memories, and inserts himself into someone else’s life instead, an imposter. Other favourites were The Distance, where a train driver’s life is changed when a man steps out onto the tracks in front of him, and Late Arrival, where a tenuous friendship is struck up between two women, but only in the early hours of the morning.
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Out of nine short stories I’d say I fully enjoyed five of them, would have appreciated two of them more with a deeper understanding of German history and culture, and just straight up got bored with the other two. That’s not a bad ratio in my eyes! And Katy Derbyshire’s translation throughout is excellent, the style is stark and straightforward, perfectly capturing the lonely essence of fleeting encounters and chance meetings in the dark.
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(I actually added up my ratings for each story for this, forgot how much I liked doing that with collections!)

[Vesna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not sure if it's the original writing or translation or both, but it's stylistically awkward and boring. It appears that the author wanted to use the cinematic technique, but it mostly failed with too many distracting details that neither add up to the story nor bring out the atmosphere. Pity, because the stories are about those living on the margins of the post-Cold War "prosperous" societies, mostly what used to be East Germany.

[Tommi · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were moments when Meyer’s stories of marginal people resonated with me – “Late Arrival,” “Dark Satellites,” “The Distance” – yet I feel ambivalent about the collection as a whole, as though I had missed some essential feature that elevates this above the average slice of life story collection. I’m looking forward to reviews of this, which I hope it will get, in order to appreciate it more.

[Meike · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Was heißt schon gegenwärtig? Gegenwärtigkeit ist eine Legende und ein vollkommen falscher Begriff, wir befinden uns immer wieder woanders (...)." (S.159)

Clemens Meyer schreibt in diesem Kurzgeschichten-Band über Verlust, Sehnsucht und die Vergangenheit, die nie wirklich vorbei ist. Großartig.

[Johann (jobis89) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Truly don’t feel like I’m the target audience for this short story collection. The vast majority went straight over my head. The writing was a little too stark and blunt for my personal taste. 2.5 stars.

[Emmeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surprisingly, this is my book-of-the-year so far. Who could have guessed? I like short stories but tend to tire of single-author collections, yet this was a book I found myself picking up again and again gladly. Each story started a little dully, and I mentally ruled it out as “probably boring” before being swept up in it, strangely affected, and deposited on the other side feeling as though I’d had my eyes opened, but to what exactly I wasn’t sure.

Meyer writes in a narrative voice that felt totally new and distinctive to me. Protagonists are largely vaguely anonymous working class men in the days after (but how many days after?) German reunification. Refugees from many places and from many wars move through these stories, some in the past, some in the present, many nameless. Time is not so much hazy as deliberately slippery, with each story sliding back and forth between past, present and future, and some of which don’t seem to be real.

It sounds unreadable, but the stories are simple, and I found a kind of dark magic in the writing style that drew me in. I can understand that what worked spectacularly for me about this collection could completely alienate someone else. But for me it set off that kind of sparkly, incantatory effect that you can never predict but which is probably the reason I read.

[jpm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Acquistai il libro impressionato dalla copertina, incuriosito dal titolo pensando: chissà...!
Ho finito il libro e posso affermare che ho fatto bene ad acquistarlo perché i racconti in esso contenuti sono davvero molto belli. Tutti.
Meyer ci mette in contatto con 'mondi' abitati da persone che hanno provato a reagire ad una vita piatta, senza picchi e con scarse prospettive di emancipazione all'orizzonte; gente che ha 'combattuto' per il proprio sogno, ha perso e ha accettato la sconfitta.
I racconti trasudano malinconia ma non fanno male anzi, aiutano a comprendere che la sconfitta fa parte 'del gioco', che nella vita le sconfitte supereranno di gran lunga le vittorie ma questo non può e non deve essere motivo di rinuncia.
Buona lettura.

[Regan · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could write like Clemens Meyer or translate like Katy Derbyshire omg

[Beverly · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories and Meyer’s narrative voices are brilliant. I was enthralled by all except for the last story, which evaded my comprehension.

[Dirk Schmücker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Büschen langatmig, sicher große Kunst

[Adrian Alvarez · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so impressed by Clemens Meyer. This is the first of any of his work I've read and it is already influencing so much of my own writing, specifically, his interest in viewing characters across multiple planes of time.

Meyer's technique of compressing time had a few interesting consequences (well I thought they were interesting): by flattening a character's story across time, he dispensed with a common urge authors have to fulfill a narrative arc with one character's catharsis. This is especially true for short story writers. The second consequence I noticed was that in some of the stories, like my favorite, The Beach Railways Last Run, the revelatory moment of catharsis was twisted into a narrative arc for the reader. The character was already well aware of the important details of his past. So instead of reading a story about a character who develops by uncovering a traumatic origin we read a character, who is traumatized, and the mystery of this trauma is a plotted adventure sorted out between the implied narrator and the reader, and Meyer does it so effortlessly.

Technical flourishes abound in this collection but none of it would be so remarkable if the writing were clinical or if each story felt like a writing exercise. In my experience, the very opposite was true. There is a heart running through each one of these stories. I came away from the collection feeling I had just read an apt description of what it is like to be human: that we inhabit obscuring clouds of personal history and experience and slivers of political circumstance and all of these aspects of living are what we push through every day with our arms waving in front of us as we try and make sense of things.

Maybe it's the corona shelter in place talking but I found the poignant absurdities laced into stories like Broken Glass in Unit 95, The Crack, and Dark Satellites all relevant. This is, hands down, among the best fiction I've read this year. I'm excited to seek out more of Meyer's work.

[Lucia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clemens Meyer is without doubt one of the most interesting and challenging voices in contemporary German literature. This collection of short stories invokes images of loneliness, failure, nostalgia, friendship, comradeship, death and love, shifting between the present and the past and set for the most part (though not exclusively) within Meyer‘s hometown Leipzig. The tone of most of the stories is rather bleak, the writing taking a careful approach to its characters, its rhythm being such that it calls for a slow, attentive getting to know and - more or less - getting to like of the figures. Meyer portrays his characters (one of which, in a sense, is Leipzig itself) with great affection, without hiding their flaws (rather, in a way it feels that we are being asked to like them precisely because of their flaws). Exceptional writing.

[Sebastian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Die stillen Trabanten hat mich sehr bewegt. In seinen eindringlichen Erzählungen beschreibt Clemens Meyer "gewöhnliche" Menschen und verleiht ihnen vor dem inneren Auge des Lesers eine klare Gestalt. Mich haben vor allem Späte Ankunft, Der Spalt und Die stillen Trabanten zutiefst beeindruckt. Man nimmt teil an den Gedanken und Sorgen der einzelnen Charaktere und ihrer inneren Zerrissenheit, eindrucksvoll dargestellt durch den sprunghaften Stil, der es mir teilweise abverlangt hat, einzelne Passagen mehrfach zu lesen. Ein persönlicher Wermutstropfen waren die vielen Rechtschreibfehler im Buch, ein Thema bei dem ich möglicherweise ein bisschen pedantisch bin. Ich habe lange kein so schlecht lektoriertes Buch gelesen.

[Korcan Derinsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yazarın atmosfer kurma başarısı hayranlık uyandırıcı ama öykülerin genelinde bir tatmin edicilik sorunu var.

[Lizzy Siddal (Lizzy’s Literary Life) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bloomin’ marvellous!

Full review at:

https://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/202...

[Wee Man · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I didn't enjoy a lot of the stories in this collection, I am happy that I read it. Sometimes it's the books you don't enjoy that you get the most out of.

I loved the aesthetic that many of these short stories upheld - stories about train cleaners, hairdressers, burger grillers - as the blurb describes them, 'marginal characters'. Each short story narrates a period of time that differentiates itself from the character's normal routine of work and life. There is an undeniably strong tone, an undercurrent that connects these stories - a feeling of the mundane, no hint of optimism or opportunity, one of concrete routine and a willful acceptance life will always be the same is currently. The lack of hope and opportunity is rarely spoken of in these stories, but is an ever present character throughout.

Even with those stories I liked, to be honest, I often found them hard to follow. The author employs a style in which he frequently jumps back and forth in time from one sentence to the next, a technique I assume is employed to denote the blur/contrast the mundanity of the everyday routine with the abnormal events that are reported in the story. This is successful in building the above mentioned atmosphere and tone, but at times blurs the chronology to the point where the plot becomes tough to follow. As a product of this confusion, I often found the end of each story lacked a punch, or that I felt I'd not been able to understand the story fully.

Sadly there's some real clangers in here - I found the book to steadily trail off as I progressed through it, ending on a mind-numbing story that felt almost tonally excluded from the rest of the collection.

Honestly, I would not recommend this book. If the atmosphere doesn't click for you, then I'm sure this book may come across as a series of uneventful and perhaps inconsequential stories. But, in the short moments this book connects you'll have a very specific set of emotions transplanted into you - and that is an incredible thing to achieve.

[Will Harvey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book made me think of a quote from Taxi Driver: “Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man.” This is a bleak, bleak read. But beautiful nonetheless. A collection of short stories centered around people on the margins, in a loose orbit around other marginal people in marginal places, coming together if only for a brief moment to find something within one another. Love? Friendship? Some sort of respite from the crushing weight of an existence in a fractured East Germany, recovering from the wounds torn open by war, rebuilt into the GDR, and having that once again torn away with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I think this is definitely a good read if you’ve ever been to Germany, especially if you’ve spent any time in what was once an East German city.

“It was an old world slowly disappearing, and its inhabitants disappeared with it. The Coal Quarter with all its odd people, like figures from legends and fairy-tales... Famous drinkers who got thinner and frailer like that Phineus M. told us about, an old man wasting away on an island, punished by the gods, and in the end all they could drink was peppermint liqueur and they'd do terrible things to each other on the drink, coal merchants who couldn't sell coal because the stoves were no longer burning, faded tattoos on old skin, old grannies with elbows on faded cushions, looking out of the window all day long, kids who lived in the pubs like their fathers and sat in the rear yards by night, sat on the kerb and drank, moved out and back in again, death was on the prowl in our yards, in our buildings.”

[Andrew Pollard · Rating 2 out of 5]

This will sound harsher than I'd like, but this is among the most insubstantial books I've read. I'm no stranger to stories where little happens, but here you've got all this elliptical narrative mystique—flashbacks (or are they forwards?), disembodied voices, unannounced perspectives shifts—and it's all in service of what? A collection of stories where some unreachably obscure protagonist has a set of mildly curious interactions with a new acquaintance, friend, or lover. I could not tell you what happened in any of these stories, and not because I was lost while reading them. None of it sticks, it's all too disconnected. The writing is nice enough but Meyer simply doesn't seem to have much to say, and I don't feel like I got anything at all from reading this.

[Heli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hughlight des Jahres für mich 5/5!

[André · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atmosphärisch dichte Miniaturen. Vielleicht schaffe ich es noch, den Film im Kino zu sehen.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un po' avvilenti questi racconti ambientati nell'ex DDR, con molti flashback del periodo sovietico. Pochi spunti di allegria, di speranza, ma molto umani. I dialoghi sono splendidi, veramente verosimili, costruiti tutti come piccole conversazioni estemporanee (cosa che i dialoghi in effetti sarebbero, ma sono pochissimi gli scrittori in cui ho trovato questa naturalezza). Atmosfere fuligginose e crepuscolari, di periferie squallide, cemento e intonaco sbriciolato, insomma poco da stare allegri.

[Curtis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This felt like a piece of brutalist architecture trying to convince you it’s a cathedral; it was rough and rugged, and lacked any of the decorum you often find carved into more impressionist writings. The themes fell to rubble and I found myself digging through the wreckage trying to grasp some moral, some idea, that simply wasn’t there. The narrative decayed into this limbo, where time was liminal and disparate, and I personally found it choppy; a crude ocean of text that just never found its footing. The stories were never concrete and all had similar plots and shapes to them, built on the same monotonous foundations. It just felt like there could have been more.

That said, I did like some of the stories. “Three” and “Under The Ice” were interesting. There were some small shards of writing that glinted throughout that I did enjoy, but overall, the writing was lack lustre. A disappointing read.

[Steven Claeys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clemens Meyer is een gevestigde naam bij Fitzcarraldo Editions, waar inmiddels drie van zijn werken zijn verschenen: While We Were Dreaming, Meyers debuutroman, gevolgd door Bricks and Mortar en Dark Satellites. Meyer, geboren en getogen in het voormalige Oost-Duitsland, staat bekend om zijn scherpe, rauwe en poëtische schrijfstijl. In zijn werk verkent hij vaak de harde realiteit van het leven in Oost-Duitsland na de hereniging. Deze kenmerkende stijl en thematiek komen ook duidelijk naar voren in zijn verhalenbundel Dark Satellites, oorspronkelijk gepubliceerd als Die stillen Trabanten.

Dark Satellites bevat twaalf op zichzelf staande verhalen, waarin de hoofdpersonages stuk voor stuk aan de rand van de samenleving staan. Het zijn vaak eenzame zielen, op zoek naar een vorm van verbinding in een wereld die hen lijkt te hebben buitengesloten.

Het boek ademt een diepe, schrijnende eenzaamheid. Of het nu gaat om de beveiligingsagent uit Broken Glass in Unit 95, die blijft hangen in de herinnering aan een korte, verloren liefde met een vluchtelinge, de oude vrouw uit The Crack die haar overleden kleinzoon Lucas vervangt door de protagonist en hem hardnekkig als haar kleinzoon blijft zien, of de hoofdfiguur uit The Beach Railway Last Run, die zich na een breuk met zijn echtgenote terugtrok in een hotel aan de kust—Meyer weet dit gevoel als geen ander te vangen.

De eenzaamheid zit niet alleen in de personages, maar ook in de sfeer en settings waarin de verhalen zich afspelen. Verlaten stations, lege treinen, vervallen arbeidersbuurten, nachtelijke, doorregende scènes en leegstaande winkelpanden vormen het decor dat Meyers verhalen hun melancholische kracht geeft. Zijn wereld is er een van desolate ruimtes en verloren dromen, waarin de personages proberen grip te krijgen op hun bestaan. Een leven vaak getekend door een gemis. Een gemis naar een verloren geliefde, naar een gesneuvelde kleinzoon, naar een maitresse die uit het leven verdween, naar oude vrienden, lang geleden gestorven, naar een neefje dat niet gered kon worden bij een treinongeval...

'... but they didn't open the door. Not Hamed, not her. Winter came, spring came, I worked long hours and came home very late and at one point they were gone, moved out, left the high-rise, and I stood downstairs in the slush and counted the floors.'

Ook gemiste kansen in het verleden en spijt over wat vroeger gebeurde vormen een een rode draad doorheen deze verhalenbundel en dragen bij aan de melancholische sfeer.

'I fetched Bertha out of the overturned carriage and carried her down to the beach. Karli was trapped. He was lying outside and his leg was trapped. I... He looked at me as I fetched her out of the carriage. I still see it now, him looking at me. Please help me. He was crying. I liked him so much, my cousin Karli. I should have pulled him out. I should have tried.'

De weinige lichtpuntjes in de verhalen worden gevormd door toevallige ontmoetingen, toevallige momenten waarin de hoofdfiguren verbinding maken. Christa, de poetsvrouw, die vriendschap sluit met Birgit, een kapster die in een kapsalon aan het station werkt. Of de jockey die kennis maakt met de hoofdfiguur in 'Under the ice' en een jarenlange langeafstandsvriendschap sluit. Of de oude man die zijn verhaal over de oude spoorweg op het strand kwijt kan aan een luisterend oor. Kleine, korte momenten van connectie, die de eenzaamheid nog sterker in de verf zetten.

Niet alle verhalen werkten voor mij. Het boek sluit bijvoorbeeld af met 'In our time', een verhaal over Willi Bredel, Duits schrijver en activist, die we volgen tijdens zijn schrijfproces tijdens de oorlog in Rusland volgen. Te fragmentair, teveel historische info, te gekunsteld naar mijn mening...

Meyer weet doorheen het boek de stilte en leegte van zijn settings met een beklemmende precisie te beschrijven. Tegelijkertijd schetst hij de innerlijke wereld van zijn personages met een empathische nuance, waarbij kleine gebaren en gedachten een diepe emotionele impact krijgen.

Een ander kenmerk van Meyers stijl is zijn vermogen om tijd en herinnering te vervlechten. Hij schakelt moeiteloos tussen het heden en flashbacks, waardoor de littekens van het verleden voelbaar blijven in het leven van zijn personages. Deze structuur versterkt het thema van gemiste kansen, onafgemaakte verhalen,en de melancholie van zijn wereld. Eén recensie die ik las, spreekt over 'een fluïde chronologie'.

Meyers zinnen zijn soms fragmentarisch en rauw, wat de urgentie en intensiteit van zijn proza versterkt. Tegelijkertijd kan hij in één enkel beeld of zinsnede een volledig emotioneel landschap schetsen, zoals in het citaat: ‘It was an old world, slowly disappearing, and its habitants disappearing with it.’ Dit soort zinnen blijft lang na het lezen hangen en vat de kern van de verhalen samen: de tragiek van een verdwijnende wereld en de mensen die erin achterblijven.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Born in 1977 in East Germany, Clemens Meyer witnessed during his formative years the decay, death, and abandonment of its nominally communist culture and government. Dark Satellites consists of short stories testifying to the ruins of that past, borne on the backs of those compelled to live under its rule. Recurring motifs among the stories include abandoned railways (or recollections of former railway work), pairs of people who form loose friendships (some quality in one or the other character keeps the bonds from becoming close), men and women separated or divorced for unclear reasons, grandmothers and grandsons (real or imagined for either), abandoned factories and apartment buildings, industries and jobs that no longer exist, immigrants who start small businesses attracted by low rents, high crime rates (blamed on the immigrants) and drug addiction. All form melancholy observations by protagonists of downward-spiraling lives not their own but which could be: witnesses to declines in parallel lives, one track of which imperceptibly veered from the other at some indistinguishable point.

Aptly, the last story concerns an old Jewish writer, a communist in the Russian mold who survived the Nazis and battles against Spain’s fascists. A communist in the Russian mold who, like his comrades, looked forward to bringing socialism to Germany—a communism that demanded self-criticism of its members, but which never allowed itself to be criticized or admit fault in its own doings. A communism, in the hands of Stalin, that was deeply anti-Semitic, like the Nazi fascists they detested. A communism that, like the Nazi fascists they detested, was only ever bent on death and destruction, inculcating its members with fantasies and fables of noble heroism.

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