Anniversaries

Late in 1967, Uwe Johnson set out to write a book that would take the unusual form of a chapter for every day of the ongoing year. It would be the tale of Gesine Cresspahl, a thirty-four-year-old single mother who is a German émigré to Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and of her ten-year-old daughter, Marie: a story of work and school, of friends and lovers and the countless small encounters with neighbours and strangers that make up big-city life. This is an everyday tale, but also a tale of the events of the day, as gleaned by Gesine from the New York Times: Johnson could hardly foresee the convulsions of 1968, but some of the news (the racial unrest roiling America, the escalating war in Vietnam) was sure to be news for some time yet to come. Finally, it would be a tale told by Gesine to Marie about Gesine’s childhood in a small north German town, of her independent and enterprising father, of her troubled mother. Hers is a story of Nazi Germany (Gesine was born the year Hitler came to power), World War II, Soviet retribution and the grimly regulated realities of Communist East Germany. An ambitious historical novel as well as a wonderfully observed New York novel, Anniversaries would take in the unsettled world of the present along with the twentieth century’s ­disastrous past. Volume 1 of Anniversaries takes places between August 1967 and April 1968, and Volume 2 between April 1968 and August 1968. Individual volumes are not sold separately.