3.0 

We Would Have Told Each Other Everything

By Judith Hermann & Katy Derbyshire
We Would Have Told Each Other Everything by Judith Hermann & Katy Derbyshire digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

A wise and subtle work that explores the refractive power of memory, and what it means to exist in the lives of others–from one of the most highly regarded writers working in Germany today.

When Judith Hermann runs into her psychoanalyst in the middle of the night on Berlin's Kastanienallee, the meeting sparks an exploration of the moments and memories that have made a life: an intense friendship with another young mother; an unconventional childhood with long summers spent on the German coast; and the ties of familial trauma that echo through generations.

In three interconnected sections at once confessional and lyrical, We Would Have Told Each Other Everything explores how the life and work of the writer converge and depart from each other when memory is no longer reliable and dreams intrude on reality.

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We Would Have Told Each Other Everything Reviews

3.0
“My last book of the year - and I loved it. I kinda feel like crying, but not because of any specific thing. I guess I always find it very moving when someone has spent so much time trying to understand the people that they come from. Thank you Judith 🌸”
“Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publisher and Netgalley for the advanced readers copy! We Would Have Told Each Other Everything is a slow-paced, reminiscing and deep thought out work. Her prose was not for everybody, and it did take me a while to submerge into her ocean. On the other hand, she has a charisma when it comes to words that just made me not want to look away, somewhat close to hypnotizing. The mile long paragraphs can be intimidating, that I found myself struggle to start one whenever the other ends. Fortunately, her words sing. As if I could hear the hymn in the author's head as she lose herself in nostalgia. In a way, I feel like I know her, yet I don't. I myself struggle to be as descriptive as I can, but the closest thing I can compare her writing style is to compare her work to the literary book of Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. Subtle spoiler coming: Towards the end, Judith ponders whether she has to share her stories to others, all the while confusingly deciding whether it was or was not a past she encountered or it was a dream. I suffer from memory loss of my experiences and mistakenly combine reality and dream. As a reader, the way she ended her book was a bliss. It made me doubt, if she did share enough of her own or just a tinge to make us satisfied, to not crave more than what she wanted to share. I felt like I was Jon, watching through a glass waiting and yet contented.”

About Judith Hermann

Judith Hermann was born in Berlin in 1970. She is the author of several novels and story collections, including Alice, which was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; Where Love Begins; and Summerhouse, Later, which won the Kleist Prize. Her novel Daheim (Home) was a Spiegel bestseller, won the Rheingau and the Bremen Literature Prizes, and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Her work has been translated into thirty-five languages, and a number of her short stories have been adapted for film. She lives and works in Berlin.

Katy Derbyshire is the translator of contemporary German writers including Inka Parei, Heike Geissler, Olga Grjasnowa, Annett Gröschner, and Christa Wolf. Her translation of Clemens Meyer's Bricks and Mortar won the 2018 Straelen Prize for Translation. She is the cohost of a monthly translation lab and the bimonthly Dead Ladies Show.

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