Berlin Book Club

Who is in the mood for some quiet togetherness while catching up on their reading? Let’s enjoy literature or non-fiction together and come to our Reading in Companionable Silence meeting on Saturday.

Nathania will welcome members and there is time to socialize and to order some food or a beverage - ca. 30 min. Then we read for an hour in silence. After that - time to exchange impressions, suggestions, ask questions and generally have a good time.

There might be a break in the middle in order to allow for more drinks, a bathroom break etc.

Only RSVP if you really intend to come and are sure that you can make it. Please don’t waste our hosts‘s time and energy by reserving a spot and then dropping out at short notice.

What is it with Mesopotamia in my life lately? The winged creatures from Babylon and Assyrian claytablets seem to waylay me everywhere. Scary! The latter awaited me in Elif Shafak‘s „THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY“.
We had read her „THE ISLAND OF MISSING TREES“ a while ago and liked it a lot (perfect book don’t make for great discussions) and I think this one has stuff to keep us entertained and busy thinking.
NYT says: „Shafak asks us to think of water as not a resource but a companion, to imagine its precious, ancient story. She reminds us that the story of written language, from the counting of cereal crops to the first epic tale of a deluge, was born from the water feeding the harvests of Mesopotamia and used to mold the first cuneiform tablets. She reminds us, powerfully, of the material nature of human thought and culture, the continuity of time and the proximity of our ancestors.“
So I‘d like to invite you to discuss THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY together.

Another meeting dedicated to finding answers to the question „how did we end up here“.

Times Literary REview says about the book:
„Long-range commentary on Russian history often amounts to an endless rerun of the nineteenth-century debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers. Either Russia is defined by its Muscovite destiny as an autocratic empire nation with its own distinctively collectivist forms of social organization or it is on a long road to convergence with more or less liberal nation-states. The first of these interpretations might seem to have been having the better of the argument in the new era following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Whichever way, all Russia-watchers are currently haunted by the question: how did we end up here?

In this volume of essays – drawn in part from a prizewinning book that was published in Russia in 2017 and here translated by Giuliano Vivaldi, with a useful preface by Tony Wood – Ilya Budraitskis presents a sharp analysis of how Russia’s current political order came to be, commendably focusing our attention on short- and medium-term factors rather than the longue durée. His underlying preoccupation is to account for the inability of the left to mount an effective opposition to the rise of post-Soviet free-market authoritarianism, an ideology whose incongruities and weaknesses have been easier to identify than to challenge. Although the essays predate February’s invasion, they were written after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, in full knowledge of the imperial-chauvinist turn in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This is very much a book for our times.“

Elizabeth alerted me to this novel. And she is absolutely right - we are the BERLIN book club and it is always great (for me anyway) when my hometown of choice becomes the setting of a novel and even more so when the story told happens in the time and place I called home - the DDR. I love this chance to re-think and mull over.
The book got additional attention because it now is on the longlist of the Women‘s Prize of Fiction. The Manchester Review says about it:
„This novel tells the story of people pushed to the margins, othered, but who are shown with their dreams, beauty, and integrity intact. People who are attempting to carve out space for themselves in a changing, sometimes hostile world. Many of the elements at work during the collapse of the DDR – the uncertain status of immigrants, political and social instability, an under-threat welfare state – seem again to be of great relevance to us, today. But the truly human import of such weighty themes is, in this novel, enacted through things that are evergreen. Love, requited and unrequited, romantic and familial. Duty and obligation. Friendship. Hope. Loss. The things that bind, and the things that sunder.“
So let‘s see what we think about it!