Prose
Twelve Nights
By Gerlind Reinshagen
Translated from the Germanby Anthony Vivis
Torn as they often are between too much and too little memory, German writers have only recently ventured above ground in their explorations of German wartime and postwar suffering. With this collection of vignettes, prolific playwright Reinshagen courts memory--taunts it, even--as her characters, often little more than oblique sketches, tell their stories of reconstruction. Readers are similarly challenged: to scrounge similarities and sew meaning across Reinshagen's 12 narrative "nights" of varying degrees of darkness. Children play-acting out leg amputations; a white muslin dress dyed black and worn and reworn until shiny; Brother Sisyphus covering his canvases with only white primer--like W. G. Sebald, Reinshagen homes in on memory's affinity for the visually visceral... Readers familiar with the genre will enjoy Reinshagen as a complement to Sebald, Uwe Timm, and Gunter Grass.
—Brendan Driscoll, Booklist, March 1st, 2005
At last readers of English can experience the expressiveness and descriptive powers of Gerlind Reinshagen, one of Germany's foremost living novelists and playwrights.
—James H. Spohrer, University of California, Berkeley
Gerlind Reinshagen, who is best known as a dramatist and writer of radio plays, reveals herself as a gifted storyteller. Her compositions are tough, purposeful, laconic. The charm of these texts lies in the tension between the austere narrative framework and the yielding, lyrical language...
—Pia Reinacher, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Twelve Nights is a beautiful and silent book, into which you have to find your way; but once inside, the book won't let you go until you've found a story of your very own.
—Wiesbadener Tagblatt
An important figure in contemporary German literature and performance, Gerlind Reinshagen is both novelist and playwright, and a member of PEN Germany. Twelve Nights is her first novel to be translated into English. Anthony Vivis has translated several of Reinshagen's plays, including The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe. He teaches at the University of East Anglia.
May 2005 140 pages $16.00 ISBN: 978-0-942996-52-4
