Part of YearA of A Year

of
A Year of Adventurous Reading
with MacLehose Press
ADVENTUROUS
READING
ADVENTUROUS
READING

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LARS MYTTING, a novelist and journalist, was
born in Fåvang, Norway, in 1968. He is the
author of Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking
and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way, which
has become an international bestseller and
was the British Book Industry Awards Non-
Fiction Book of the Year in 2016. His novel
Svøm med dem som drunker, now published in
English as The Sixteen Trees of the Somme, was
awarded the Norwegian National Booksellers’
Award and has been bought for film.
PAUL RUSSELL GARRETT is a translator from
Danish and Norwegian of novels, plays and
children’s books. He is also Programme
Director for the theatre translation initiative,
[Foreign Affairs] Translates!
MacLehose Press
an imprint of
Quercus
www.maclehosepress.com
Jacket illustration and design by The Picture Production Company
Photograph of Lars Mytting © Julie Pike
Year Of Adventurous Reading_A5 Booklet_v4.indd 2
A Year of
Adventurous
Reading L ARS MY T TING
LARS MYTTING
Edvard grows up on a remote mountain
farmstead in Norway with his taciturn
grandfather, Sverre. The death of his parents
when he was a small boy has always been
the author of norwegian wood shrouded in mystery – he has never been told
how or where it happened, and has only a
THE SI XT EEN
distant memory of his mother.
And the story of his grandfather’s late
brother, Einar, is somehow bound up with
By Norway’s bestselling novelist and this mystery. A coffin is delivered long before
TH E S IXTEEN TREES OF THE S OMME
the author of NORWEGIAN WOOD,
a family story of epic scale. TREES OF THE his grandfather’s death – a meticulous art-
deco piece made of flame birch, with the
hallmark of a master craftsman. Perhaps
SO M M E
Einar is not dead after all.
“Probably this year’s most riveting novel, a widescreen
Edvard’s desperate quest to unlock the
narrative that must be considered his definitive
tragic secrets of two families takes him on
breakthrough as a writer . . . This book is so blessedly well
a long journey, following a trail of clues
written that even the most elaborate twists become logical from Norway to the Shetlands and to the
and acceptable milestones in an intricate story” battlefields of France. Navigating divided
RUNE HALLHEIM, Aftenposten wartime allegiances and the love of two
women, he is led ultimately to the discovery
“A tragic and astonishing narrative about the love of wood, of a very unusual inheritance.
about family secrets, and finding your own self. About grief, The Sixteen Trees of the Somme is a beautifully
loss and love . . . If Norwegian Wood had not made intricate, moving tale that spans an entire
Lars Mytting a celebrity, this novel would” century, about a fascination with wood,
MAJA TROBERG DJUVE, Dagbladet about love, and about finding out who
you really are.
Fiction
I S B N 978-0-85705-604-7
9 780857 056047
M AC L E HO S E PR E S S
MacLehose
A NOV EL £16.99
Price in the UK
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 A Year of
Adventurous Reading
Welcome to A Year of Adventurous Reading. This is a unique book club running
throughout 2018 to celebrate ten years of MacLehose Press, a publisher that
seeks out the best literature from around the world and makes it available in
English. We’re taking readers on a journey in ten books, and opening up the rich,
wonderful world of international fiction. Dip in to our list, or aim to read all ten
with us; either way, join us on an exciting voyage to discover new voices, thrilling
stories and fresh ideas.
We hope you enjoy Look Who’s Back and are tempted to read some of the
others on our list:
• February – Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes, translated by Jamie Bulloch
(Germany)
• March – An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy (India)
• April – The President’s Gardens by Muhsin al-Ramli, translated by Luke
Leafgren (Iraq)
• May – The Life of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price, translated by Lloyd
Jones (Wales)
• June – A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava (U.S.A.)
• July – An Englishman in Madrid by Eduardo Mendoza, translated by Nick
Caistor (Spain)
• August – Mend The Living by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica
Moore (France)
• September – The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker,
translated by Sam Taylor (Switzerland)
• October – The Sixteen Trees of Somme by Lars Mytting, translated by Paul
Russell Garrett (Norway)
• November – The Bickford Fuse by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris
Dralyuk (Russia)
Reading materials from our authors, translators and editors can be found at
www.maclehosepress.com, where you can join the discussion online – tell us
what you’re reading, or what you’ve been inspired to discover, using the hashtag
#AdventurousReading. We’d love to know what you think of our books, and
where your reading will take you afterwards.

@maclehosepress @maclehosepress

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 Why I wanted to write
Look Who’s Back
Timur Vermes on his inspiration
– and spending time with the
Führer…
It was pure coincidence: I was on
holiday in Turkey and walked past a
bookseller’s stand which had Hitler’s
Second Book on display. I only knew
about Mein Kampf, so I immediately
assumed that this Second Book must
be either a parody or a fake – either
way, my next thought was: “I could
write a ‘Third Book”. You could say
that my idea originated in ignorance: had I known that Hitler had written
a second book I would probably have walked on.
There is of course an apparently endless amount of material, so it
was important to decide which information I actually needed: I had to
know how Hitler would have presented his character had he had the
opportunity to write a book about himself. And in fact I already had a
blueprint: Mein Kampf (My Struggle). At the same time, I needed sources
that would show how Hitler spoke at the podium, how he argued. I
looked to the Monologe aus dem Fuehrerhauptquartier for that. And
to round things off, I read one or two very respectable biographies to
compare my own impressions with those of other authors. I wanted to be
sure I didn’t completely miss the mark.
The whole writing process took about six months, not long at all. In fact
the plot seemed to construct itself. He wakes up on an abandoned plot of
land, and at first he needs help etc. It was useful that I knew from quite
early on how I wanted the book to end. I just needed to get from A to
B, and as a vehicle I used this “Hitler-logic” – from there it was all plain-
sailing, and I don’t think that’s a bad sign.

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 During the process my wife would say: “I really can’t stand having to
listen to the Führer anymore!” I had been reading out passages from Mein
Kampf, I thought they were just so wonderfully bizarre. But otherwise I
didn’t talk about the project much, for two reasons: First, I was scared
that someone else would get the idea – I find it extraordinary that no-one
has thought of it before! And secondly, I didn’t quite know how to convey
to people a complete sense of what I was doing. Once I told a very close
friend about my idea: Hitler wakes up in Berlin. And I could hear him
straining to be polite as he thought “Oh no! I hope he gets a proper job
soon.” So I added: “It’s really funny! It’s going to be great!” You realise
straightaway that you sound even more desperate and you just give up.
The wonderful thing about democracy is that you can make jokes about
Hitler, but you won’t find all that many jokes about Hitler in my book.
What I found so compelling is that we’re not laughing about Hitler, we’re
laughing with Hitler. At first it looks like it might be the other way round –
he’s still clumsy, confused – but the more you get into the book, the less
he appears as a joke. And that’s the frightening thing.

TIMUR VERMES was born in Nuremberg in 1967, the son of a

German mother and a Hungarian father who fled the country in
1956. He studied history and politics and went on to become a
journalist. He has written for the Abendzeitung and the Cologne
Express and worked for various magazines. He has ghostwritten
several books since 2007. Look Who’s Back is his first novel; it has
by now sold more than 2 million copies and has been translated
into more than 30 languages.

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 Why I wanted to publish
Look Who’s Back
Katharina Bielenberg, Associate Publisher
of MacLehose Press, on Look Who’s Back
Look Who’s Back was the book that rocked
Germany when first published there in late
2012, selling more than two million copies.
It was translated into forty languages,
from Persian to Indonesian, Vietnamese to
Catalan, and eventually also into Hebrew.
The English-language edition was a
bestseller in its own right, and has by now
reached a quarter of a million readers.
In its opening pages Adolf Hitler wakes up, in full military uniform and
reeking of petrol, on an area of disused ground in modern-day Berlin.
Mistaken for a brilliant impersonator, he rapidly becomes a television star
and YouTube sensation, and threatens to makes waves in the political
arena once again. Vermes admits to having had a huge amount of fun
writing his first book, a brilliant satire that savages the superficiality of
media-managed politics and our obsession with celebrity, but the novel
has a serious message too: that the horrors of the past are at risk of
being forgotten.
The most recent elections in Germany demonstrate the dangerous
re-emergence of the far right, and this is the case in many countries
across Europe. Can Europe have forgotten its recent history? It goes
without saying that Germany still has a complicated and uncomfortable
relationship with its past. Although the German public consumed Look
Who’s Back with gusto, critics argued that aspects of it were unpalatable
and found it more difficult to digest. Many simply ignored it. While being
führiously entertaining, it is also a provocative and at times challenging
read.

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 In December 2015 debate raged over whether Mein Kampf should
be allowed to enter the public domain, now that its author has been
dead for seventy years. Vermes’ own contribution to the discussion is
unequivocal: Does the government trust its people or does it not? If, after
70 years, the answer is no, does that not mean that something has gone
wrong in the educational process? And if that is the case, should this not
be admitted to, and something be done about it?
Bold and humorous, Vermes’ book heralds a new approach to what in
German is termed Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to terms with
the past”). More than just a clever comedy, Look Who’s Back is layered
and complex; its first-person narrative produces confused, uncomfortable
reactions in the reader, who can only marvel at how this Hitler outwits
politicians, journalists and celebrities with his twisted logic. With our long
tradition of satire, and an uncanny fascination with the Nazi era, this bold
and ground-breaking German import also struck a chord with an English-
language readership and led to a great deal of discussion. I hope you
enjoy your reading.

Katharina Bielenberg is Associate Publisher at MacLehose Press, an

imprint of Quercus

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 How I translated Look
Who’s Back
Jamie Bulloch on the joys and challenges of
translating Look Who’s Back
As an exercise in translation, Timur Vermes’s
bestseller Look Who’s Back was not only great
fun, it also provided me with one of the stiffest
challenges in my career. From the outset
it was clear that three aspects of the novel
would require close attention if we hoped to
get anywhere near the success this book had
enjoyed in the German-speaking world: the
cultural and historical references, Hitler’s rhetorical style, and the humour.
The first of these was partly addressed by a glossary I compiled for the
English-language edition. This was a more elegant solution, we concluded,
than trying awkwardly to cram additional material into the book itself,
thereby interrupting the flow of the text. Replicating Hitler’s style in English
was tricky, not least because the vast majority of the Führer’s written and
spoken output is intolerably longwinded and dull. The aim here was to strike
an old-fashioned, pompous tone without boring the reader. Fortunately the
author deviated sufficiently from the historical script to compose passages
where the Hitler character ties himself in logical knots, exposing the
absurdity of his reasoning.
Which brings us on to the humour. Before I embarked on my translation
I was fortunate to spend a week in residence with Timur Vermes, his
publisher and a dozen other translators (the languages varied from Chinese
to Bulgarian), during which we discussed every possible facet of the
novel, ranging from very general issues to the highly specific: for example,
the precise position of an office door on a corridor. During that week we
translators were given creative licence by both author and publisher, who
urged us to do “whatever works in your language”, especially when it came
to the humour.

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 Emboldened and encouraged by this sage advice, I began to play
around with the text in a variety of ways. Where there was no
obvious English equivalent to a joke, either I substituted a different
one or waited a few lines for the next opportunity to insert some
humour. Freed from restraints of trying to be entirely faithful to
the original, I found it much easier to translate in the spirit of the
novel, which also meant adjusting the way some characters speak.
For example, Hitler’s assistant in the book, Fräulein Krömeier, has
a thick Berlin accent in the German. I didn’t want to transpose
this voice into a specific English accent, but I was unwilling to
neutralise Frau Krömeier’s speech altogether, so I plumped for
a general metropolitan way of talking, which includes internet
slang and the contemporary trend of the rising inflection (or “High
Rise Terminals”, the Australian way of speaking) – everything she
said ended with a question mark. Sensenbrink, a manager at the
television production company, also underwent a bit of a makeover:
in the English version he continually spouts ludicrous office jargon,
emphasising the superficiality of his character.
With such scope for experimentation, not everything worked at the
first attempt and a fair deal of revision was needed before I ended
up with a text I was happy with. Nonetheless, Look Who’s Back was
one of the most rewarding projects I have been involved in from a
creative viewpoint, and I very much look forward (I assume I am not
alone in this) to seeing what Timur Vermes writes next.

JAMIE BULLOCH is also the translator Birgit Vanderbeke’s The

Mussel Feast, which won him the Schlegel-Tieck Prize, Kingdom
of Twilight by Steven Uhly, and novels by F. C. Delius, Jörg
Fauser, Martin Suter, Katharina Hagena and Daniel Glattauer.

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 Discussion Points
Look Who’s Back
1. Now that you have finished the book, do you find this Adolf
Hitler a sympathetic character? Why? How comfortable did you find
it to be inside his head?

2. How easy was it for you to suspend your disbelief at his

resurrection in modern-day Berlin?

3. How do you think this novel might resonate differently in

Germany?

4. To what extent is Look Who’s Back a warning about the threat

of extremist politicians today?

5. To what extent does the novel succeed as a denouncement of

our society’s obsession with the medium over the message?

6. How do you think the story might be continued?

7. To what extent does the choice of first-person narrative

enhance the satirical impact of the book?

8. Can you think of comparative novels, plays, film or comedy?

9. Which other historical figures would you like to see

resurrected in a novel, and why?

10. How aware were you when reading Look Who’s Back that it is
a translation?

11. Are you tempted to read Mein Kampf?

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 Suggested Further Reading
Looking for your next read after Look Who’s Back? We think our list below would
be a great place to start.

Kingdom of Twilight by Steven Uhly

(translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch)
A powerful, panoramic novel about the aftermath of war across Europe, beginning
in 1944 and following the fates of individual characters as they try to make sense
of a changed world, and their place in it.

Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander

Like Timur Vermes, Auslander has pulled off an extraordinary feat in this daring
and hilarious black comedy that walks the tightrope between humour and
offensiveness. Anne Frank is alive and more or less well and living in upstate New
York.

News from Berlin by Otto de Kat

(translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson)
Part of an elegantly interwoven quartet of short novels by Otto de Kat (Julia, The
Longest Night, Man on the Move), a true page-turner about the choices individuals
are forced to make in wartime, set between Berlin, London and Switzerland.

Journal by Hélène Berr (translated from the French by David Bellos)

The profoundly moving autobiographical account of a young Jewish girl living in
Paris under occupation. It foreshadows the horror of the camps, but it conveys an
extraordinary appetite for life, for beauty, for literature and for all that lasts. In the
tradition of timeless Holocaust literature such as Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl
and Suite Française.

Treblinka by Chil Rajchman

(translated from the Yiddish by Solon Beinfeld)
If questions raised by Look Who’s Back have left you feeling confused, read this
unembellished and exact record of incarceration in – and escape from – Treblinka
extermination camp, published in English for the first time only a few years ago.
It contains the essay “The Hell of Treblinka” by Vasily Grossman, Russian war
journalist and author of Life and Fate.

Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is being Normalized in Contemporary

Culture by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
An immensely readable study of how the depiction of the Second World War, the
Holocaust and Adolf Hitler have been viewed in scholarly works, popular novels,
feature films and online. A major contribution to our understanding of current
memories of the Third Reich and their consequences, it’s an excellent counterpoint
to Look Who’s Back.

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 A Year
of

ADVENTUROUS
READING

“Reading is a window to the world”

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