Anniversaries, Volume 2

Uwe Johnson (1934 1984) grew up in the small town of Anklam, Germany. He lived in New York City from 1966 until 1968 with his wife and daughter. It was during that time that he began work on Anniversaries. He died in Sheerness-on-Sea, UK, shortly after Anniversaries was published, at age forty-nine.

Damion Searls is the author of The Philosophy of Translation. He has translated some forty books, including, for NYRB Classics, works by Patrick Modiano, Alfred Döblin, Nescio, and Robert Walser.

[Anniversaries] requires a hard chair, a fresh pen and your full attention for attention is its great subject . . . Searls s superb translation inscribes Johnson s restlessness and probing into word choice and the structures of the sentences themselves, which quiver with the anxiety to get things right, to see the world as it is.   Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

Johnson s book effectively gives the reader forty or fifty years of world history and a single year of Gesine s life, every day from August 21st, 1967 to August, the 20th, 1968. Its scope is startling, from the social organization of a small German town, to Gesine s work in a New York bank, to her father s work as a master carpenter, running a business in Richmond, in London. Tom Sutcliffe, Saturday Review, BBC Radio 4

I am absolutely stunned and slightly mortified that I ve never heard of this book before . . . I think it s extraordinary, I think it is a great late-modern masterpiece . . . How do you map Germany in 1933 with Vietnam? But, he does it, he does it in the first paragraph. It should be clunky or absurd or just slightly embarrassing, but he does it brilliantly. It contains the whole world. . . . I was completely gripped, and there are none of the usual narrative handholds, there s no romantic relationship, you re never quite certain why she s on her own, who the father of the child is all of those props are not available to us, and still it s absolutely extraordinary. Kathryn Hughes, Saturday Review, BBC Radio 4

This book is truly a masterpiece. . . . It is a record, and an enduring one for our whole post-Hitler era. You have actually made this past tangible and perhaps a much harder task you have made it convincing. Now I know how it was and is over there know it down to the tips of my toes. . . . This seems to be the only appropriate way to speak and think: about great-grandmother and grandmother and mother and child, in the interplay of generations and across two