The Goethe Book Club is going digital! Read further to learn how we will be taking May's discussion of Before the Feast / Vor dem Fest online.
Read and discuss works by contemporary German authors in this series hosted by the Goethe-Institut. All books can be read in recent English translation or in the German original; our discussion will be in English. Led by local German professor
Amanda Sheffer (The Catholic University of America), this book club focuses on contemporary fiction and will explore experiences and thoughts about the text.
Please Note: In order to participate in the online discussion (carried out over Zoom), registrants must obtain access to the novel Before the Feast / Vor dem Fest on their own. Hard copies of the novel can be ordered through multiple vendors online; the eBook is also available for download to Kindle, iPad, and other digital reading platforms. eBook and audiobook editions of the original German edition can also be found on Goethe's Onleihe, the eLibrary of the Goethe-Institut.
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Before the Feast (Vor dem Fest) by Saša Stanišić (2014, translated by Anthea Bell in 2016)
It’s the evening before the feast in the village of Fürstenfelde (population: an odd number). The village is asleep. Except for the ferryman—he’s dead.
Someone has opened the doors to the Village Archive, but what drives the sleepless out of their houses is not that which was stolen, but that which has escaped. Old stories, myths, and fairy tales are wandering about the streets with the people. They come together in a novel about a long night, a mosaic of village life, in which the long-established and newcomers, the dead and the living, craftsmen, pensioners, and noble robbers in football jerseys bump into one another. They all want to bring something to a close, on this night before the feast.
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Saša Stanišić (1978-)
Saša Stanišić was born in Visegrad, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1978 and has lived in Germany since 1992. His debut novel,
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, was acclaimed by readers and critics alike, and has been translated into thirty languages so far. In 2019, he received the German Book Prize for his novel
Origins.
Before the Feast also won several prizes, including the 2014 Leipzig Book Fair Prize, and was long listed for the German Book Prize.
Anthea Bell (1926-2018)
Anthea Bell was the recipient of the Schlegel Tieck Prize for translation from German, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 2002 for the translation of W. G. Sebald’s
Austerlitz, and the 2003 Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation. She lived in Cambridge, England.
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Discussion of Stanišić's novel will take place via Zoom on Tuesday, May 5, at 6:30 pm. Please RSVP via Eventbrite in order to receive discussion prompts and the Zoom invite link. Discussion prompts from moderator Dr. Amanda Sheffer will be emailed to all participants RSVP'd via Eventbrite in advance of the discussion. The Zoom invite and additional directions/tips for accessing the Zoom discussion will be emailed to all participants no less than 48 hours before the discussion begins. The discussion will take place in English.
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