My job is to ‘take care’ of our client publishers and yes I do feel a motherly love for each and every one but sometimes one has a child that one favours a little more than the others. This season my favourite has a book that I have embraced and intend to ensure that everyone reads.
Every Man Dies Alone was written in 24 days by a prolific but psychologically disturbed German writer named Rudolf Ditzen, who spent a significant portion of his life in asylums (for killing a friend in a duel, for threatening his wife with a gun), in prison (for embezzling to finance his morphine habit) and in rehab. In spite of his precarious emotional state, he wrote more than two dozen books under the pen name Hans Fallada, which he took from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Before the war, he was an international bestseller and considered on par with Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse.
The Otto and Anna Quangel of Fallada’s novel are stand-ins for real-life Berliners, Otto and Elise Hampel, a working-class couple who conducted a postcard campaign for more than two years at the height of Hitler’s power, after Elise’s brother was killed in the war. Arrested in October 1942, they were sentenced to death by the Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court) in January 1943 and executed by beheading. Their Gestapo files came into Fallada’s hands in the fall of 1945, entrusted to him by a poet and postwar cultural official, Johannes Becher, who knew of Fallada’s prolific literary output and recognized his gift for objective narration.
This past month I was visiting Melville House in Brooklyn when the fax came in from the New York Times with a review that would be run on the following Sunday. The first line of the review began with “A signal literary event of 2009 has occurred, but if publishers had been more vigilant, it could have been a signal literary event in any of the last 60 years.” As Dennis Johnson sat at his board room table reading aloud, albeit with difficulty as the faxed copy was extremely blurred, to his co-publisher and wife, their publicist, an editor, and myself, we sat and listened in disbelief, joy and wonder. When he was finished, we were silently drinking in all the superlatives that had been used to describe a book that had been a result of a long search and many years to bring to fruition. I think it was me who suggested we needed to have some champagne to celebrate.
Every Man Dies Alone is in stores this week. It is the first time it has ever been translated into English. The book is more than a thriller, more than a love story, it is a slice of history that Fallada has created that will stay with you and you’ll want to talk about with other readers.
More and more glowing reviews are coming in and I couldn’t be more thrilled for my favourite but I don’t think I’ll forget that moment in Brooklyn when my own timing couldn’t have been better.
