.png)
The Big Book Project
The Big Book Project is a multi-venue reading experience for bibliophiles fascinated by long or dense works of fiction and interested in discussing them with others, one novel at a time.
The works selected will be capacious novels from the mid-nineteenth century through today that possess an abundant writing style or complexity in structure and themes.
The notion that reading need not be a solitary activity has special resonance with these novels given that there is much to discuss, elaborate upon and question in the authors’ expression of ideas. I like to think of these novels as abundant because I appreciate their richness and volume, characteristics bestow a sort of grace to luxuriate with the text.
The critic and scholar Alexander Nehamas writes that when a work of art beckons, it is because we do not fully understand it but feel the strong desire to do so. And it is this deliberative process, the journey, of trying to understand why a novel is extraordinary that I want to explore with fellow readers at The Big Book Project.
We discuss books like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666
The Big Book Project
Effingers by Gabriele Tergit, with Nick During (NYRB)
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject
Effingers by Gabriele Tergit is an 800-page German Jewish family saga published by New York Review of Books Classics, and this week NYRB publicist Nick During joins me to talk about what makes it so special.
Nick and I follow three generations of the Effinger family from a watchmaker’s bench in small-town Bavaria to the grand houses and Sunday lunches of Berlin, across about seventy years of German history that ends with the catastrophic destruction of the family and German Jewish civilization in WWII.
We talk about Gabriele Tergit’s documentary style and her 151 short chapters, the way she gives us almost no interiority yet still makes these people feel vibrant and alive. We talk about Uncle Waldemar, the jurist who refuses to convert and decades later sees clearly what is coming. We talk about the remarkable women of the novel, and about the last hundred pages, where the dread finally lands. And we spend time with Tergit herself, a Berlin court reporter and author of Käsebier Takes Berlin (also published by NYRB), who fled in Germany in 1933 and finished this book in exile at a point in time when the world of Effingers and the type of characters that populate it, had vanished.
If you want to read Effingers in good company, follow The Big Book Project on Substack and subscribe wherever you listen. Come read the big books with me.