BOOKMARKS
The Age
Saturday March 19, 2011
Hans Fallada and the missing chapter; Scribe basks in Miles Franklin listings; Andrew O'Hagan on helping out his friend Julian Assange; the puzzling delay with Jennifer Egan; the digital autograph arrives. By Jason Steger. Alone once moreONE of the surprise bestsellers of recent times has been Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin. First published in 1947 in Germany, it told the story of the Quangels, a couple who begin a postcard campaign against the Nazis after their son is killed fighting in the German army. Now the book's original publisher has looked in its archives and discovered that a chapter deleted by Fallada before publication gives a more ambivalent picture of the Quangels' attitude to Hitler. The Guardian quoted Aufbau director Rene Strien saying the first edition was "more tame, more black and white". He pointed out that Aufbau was an East German publisher and "there was censorship back then. A communist should be a marvellous person, a Nazi should be bad". Aufbau has republished the fuller version this month under its original title, Jeder stirbt fur sich allein (Everyone dies alone). Adam Freudenheim, publisher of Penguin Classics, told Bookmarks that he had not yet decided what to do with the new material that makes "a relatively small, subtle change to the novel". And he pointed out that as Fallada had died before the novel was first published, no one knows what the final version might have looked like had he lived. "The changes and cuts were being made while he was still alive, but we don't have his replies to the letters sent to him in hospital, on what would be his deathbed so we don't know what he thought of the final, edited version published shortly after his death in 1947 and which we published in English translation for the first time in 2009." The success of the novel in Britain, Australia and the US has given it new impetus in Germany, where, Freudenheim points out, it was far from Fallada's most famous novel. In Britain in one year more copies were sold than in Germany over the previous 60. Freudenheim said since republication at the end of February, Alone in Berlin had had extensive coverage in the German media. And he pointed out that in a recent discovery in Jerusalem of correspondence between Fallada and Austrian Jewish writer and literary agent Carl Ehrenstein there was a letter from Fallada's British publisher, Putnam, which had put out his books in the '30s, explaining it had turned down Alone in Berlin because Fallada after all his tribulations "had lost his inspiration".A novel time for ScribeSCRIBE started a local fiction list only about five years ago and publisher Henry Rosenbloom reckoned it would take about seven years for it to be "viable and profitable". With the news that Jon Bauer (Rocks in the Belly) and Chris Womersley (Bereft) had been longlisted for the Miles Franklin (on top of their Indie Awards), Rosenbloom said Scribe had reached its target earlier than expected. This was a "great vindication of the hard work and judgment of (commissioning editor) Aviva Tuffield". Scribe published only six Australian novels last year and they included Fiona McGregor's Indelible Ink, which has been shortlisted for the $35,000 Barbara Jeffris award for the best Australian novel depicting "women and girls in a positive way". The others were Lenny Bartulin's The Black Russian, Katie Wall's I Say Tomato , and Maris Morton's A Darker Music, the inaugural winner of the CAL Scribe fiction prize for a writer over 35, which is a terrific innovation.Ghost-leakingTHE Scottish writer Andrew O'Hagan says that one of the hallmarks of his writing is to look at characters from all points of view; to picture them not necessarily from the obvious or standard perspective. This applies to his fiction and non-fiction essays such as the one he wrote early in his career about the murder of the two-year-old Liverpool toddler James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys, and the character of the priest in his novel Be Near Me. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that he is supposed to be ghostwriting Julian Assange's memoir. When asked about the project, O'Hagan, who was in Melbourne last week, said that at the moment things were a bit difficult, by which you would assume he means Assange's possible extradition from Britain to Sweden to face sexual assault charges. But in confirming that Assange was a friend of his he added that any book he worked on would be "Julian's own story".Egan gem visiting soonTHERE has been a lot of word of mouth about Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, which last week won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in the US, along the way pipping Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. The novel, which Egan says was inspired both by Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and The Sopranos, was published in the US last June. People here have been licking their lips in anticipation but despite the book being published in Britain this month, it won't be published here until May. Technically, that is. Because of the 30-day rule (a book must be released here within 30 days of publication overseas otherwise booksellers are allowed to bring in competing editions) you can get American editions of the much-admired book at certain bookshops around town and, of course, online. But Australian readers don't always face long delays with books from the US. Take the case of Nicole Krauss's most recent novel, Great House, which was published in the US last October. Surprisingly, it came out here a few days earlier and it was published in Britain only last month. Hard to work out.Sign of the timesLOTS of people love to queue up and get authors to sign their books. But what do you do if you have an ebook? One US company, the Florida-based Autography, has come up with something of a solution. It has devised a platform that allows an author to write on their iPad and then send the dedication to the reader digitally. It simply adds an extra page to the ebook and leaves everyone happy. That is according to T. J. Waters, former CIA agent, author and the man who invented it.
© 2011 The Age