The International Berlin Literature Festival formally begins on September 6th this year, but 'Berlin liest' is a long running prefatory tradition that my bookseller mother has also celebrated once or twice.
'Berlin reads': People and businesses read aloud a book, for no more than 30 minutes, in public. It's a kind of 'amuse bouche' for the festival itself.
***
There are few restrictions, but the organizers offered a few nudges. Why not read poetry by Dinçer Güçyeter, whose prose and poetry memoir Unser Deutschlandmärchen won the prize at the Leipzig Book Fair in April? Or Palestinian author and current New Yorker Ibtisam Azem, who wrote Das Buch vom Verschwinden as a reflection on the ongoing conflict in Israel and the Palestinian Territories? Salman Rushdie's Victory City is also on the list, in honour of the author who was notoriously attacked last year. Jeffrey Eugenides's Virgin Suicides and Middlesex are well known, Bora Chung's short stories in Der Fluch des Hasen (Cursed Bunny) imaginative works of fiction.
In the end I read the magical realist short story "Five Years Next Sunday." Idza Luhumyo won the Caine Prize for African Writing for it, in 2022. You can read it as well on the Prize's website.
It's short, but full of imagery, and the metaphors are so complex that I wasn't able to disentangle them fully. (If they are all metaphors; some things you can probably also understand literally, like acquaintances rudely pawing the protagonist's hair.) Pili, the main character, is being emotionally bled dry by the family (parents and teenaged brothers) and new friends around her. On one level she sees through their motivations, on another level she doggedly takes their purported affection at face value. At the same time, I think, Pili is scrambling for a chance to escape and to chase her own daydreams.
She keeps looking outside, reporting on the gathering of the clouds, the darkening of the day, the flight of the birds. “Rain is coming,” she whispers.
