The latest in our annual series of translators on their favourite German books of the year is Rachel Ward.
My German book of the year was Junge Frau, am Fenster stehend, Abendlicht, blaues Kleid [Young Woman Standing at the Window, Evening Light, Blue Dress] by Alena Schröder (dtv, 2021). Hannah is a student in Berlin who suddenly discovers that her elderly grandmother Evelyn might be the heir to a painting, possibly an unknown Vermeer, that had been secreted away by her birth mother Senta, when her Jewish second husband’s art gallery was expropriated by the Nazis. It had been on my radar for a while and finally made it to the top of the ITI German Network book club’s reading list. It’s part art thriller, but like a lot of the books we’ve read lately (e.g. Mareike Fallwickl’s Die Wut die bleibt), there’s a lot about motherhood and the way patterns of behaviour get repeated, or don’t. Evelyn was a particularly fascinating character, and her trying to deal with loving Trude, the aunt who brought her up, despite everything she’d done was very moving. I enjoyed the fact that it didn’t have a tidy, pat ending – although as there’s a sequel, maybe the loose ends will be tied up there. Incidentally, two of your guests’ picks from last year also ended up as book club reads for us – Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand, as picked by Ruth Martin, and Teresa Präauer’s Kochen im falschen Jahrhundert as recommended by Tess Lewis, both of which I enjoyed too.
My other favourite this year was Isabel Bogdan’s Laufen. The story of a woman rediscovering running as she deals with a shattering loss sounds pretty bleak, and it’s told in a stream-of-consciousness style that I don’t normally get along with, yet I enjoyed it a lot. The voice here is witty, angry, sarcastic and ends up hopeful. It drew me in right from the start, and finds a skillful balance to avoid being glib or clichéd about finding new strength and a way back to life… And having started running in my 40s and then had to stop, it made me look forward to being able to get back out there too!
Rachel Ward, MA, MITI, lives in Wymondham, near Norwich, UK, and has been working as a freelance literary and creative translator from German and French to English since gaining her MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia. She specialises in children’s and young adult literature as well as crime fiction and other contemporary literature. Her non-fiction interests include history, politics, art, journalism and travel. She can be found on Bluesky as @racheltranslates.bsky.social and Instagram as @racheltranslates.