Bricks and Mortar

by Clemens Meyer, Katy Derbyshire (Translator)

Overview

Bricks and Mortar is the story of the sex trade in a big city in the former GDR, from just before 1989 to the present day, charting the development of the industry from absolute prohibition to full legality in the twenty years following the reunification of Germany. The focus is on the rise and fall of one man from football hooligan to large-scale landlord and service-provider for prostitutes to, ultimately, a man persecuted by those he once trusted. But we also hear other voices: many different women who work in prostitution, their clients, small-time gangsters, an ex-jockey searching for his drug-addict daughter, a businessman from the West, a girl forced into child prostitution, a detective, a pirate radio presenter…

     In this ambitious novel, Clemens Meyer pays homage to modernist, East German and contemporary writers like Alfred Döblin, Wolfgang Hilbig and David Peace but uses his own style and almost hallucinatory techniques. Time shifts and stretches, people die and come to life again, and Meyer takes his characters seriously and challenges his readers in this dizzying eye-opening novel that also finds inspiration in the films of Russ Meyer, Takashi Miike, Gaspar Noé and David Lynch.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781910695197
Publisher:	Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publication date:	09/26/2016
Pages:	672
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Clemens Meyer was born in 1977 in Halle and lives in Leipzig. Bricks and Mortar, his first novel to be published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions, was shortlisted for the German Book Prize, awarded the Bremer Literaturpreis 2014, longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize, and shortlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. His collection of stories, Dark Satellites, appeared with Fitzcarraldo Editions in Katy Derbyshire’s translation in 2020. While We Were Dreaming, Meyer’s debut novel, was originally published in Germany in 2007.

Katy Derbyshire, originally from London, has lived in Berlin for over twenty-five years. She translates contemporary German writers including Inka Parei, Heike Geissler, Olga Grjasnowa, Annett Gröschner and Christa Wolf. Her translation of Clemens Meyer’s Bricks and Mortar was the winner of the 2018 Straelener Übersetzerpreis (Straelen Prize for Translation). She occasionally teaches translation and also co-hosts a monthly translation lab and the bi-monthly Dead Ladies Show. Katy Derbyshire’s translation journal for While We Were Dreaming is published online at toledo-programm.de.

Read an Excerpt

When the evening comes I stand by the window. I push the slats of the blind apart with my fingers and look at the evening sky behind the buildings on the other side of the road. It’s still getting dark early. The year’s not even a month old and already it feels long and hard. Mind you, there’s not much work at the moment. We all complain in January. I just want to catch one last sight of the sun and the last ray of light. I leave for work at eight in the morning; it’s still not really light then. Everything’s better in the summer. I bet everyone says that but on the other hand, in summer I think of holidays and I often don’t feel like working. And I think things go best in the winter, if you leave January out of it. Mind you, lots of us probably see that differently. It’s a shame the flat doesn’t have a balcony. I could sit out there in the summer and sunbathe, better than the stupid tanning salon, and in winter I could stand out there before sunset and have a smoke and watch the sky, watch it turning red. I like to look at the moon on clear nights. It always reminds me of that song. My mother used to sing it to me before I went to sleep. ‘The Moon Has Arisen’. When I hear it now, and that doesn’t happen often, I don’t know when I hear it at all, so… I can’t really describe it. Sometimes I sing it in my head. Magda always used to say: ‘I’m getting feelings,’ when she meant she was feeling sad. But it’s rubbish actually, that thing about the seasons. Summer or winter, autumn or spring, the phone always rings. Just not that much in January. When I was a child I used to think, when I was very little though, that there was a fifth season. And once I asked my mother if the year starts on the first of January every year and if New Year’s Eve is always one day before that. And if it ever snows in June. She laughed and hugged me – that’s why I haven’t forgotten it. Just like the song. I’ve often thought about the white mist in the song, before I go to sleep. When I have a child one day I’ll sing them a different song. One that’s not so sad. I’m more of a cheerful person. ‘Alert and lively,’ they wrote in my school report. They always had these assessments by the teachers. And Magda always used to say: ‘Don’t get so hyper, girl, you’re as fluttery as a bird.’ She’d say so many funny things, and sometimes they were fitting and sometimes they weren’t at all, and I miss that. She’s in Hannover now. She sends me cards sometimes and she always remembers my birthday. She always used to say letters and cards are more personal than text messages. She sends me these really cheesy postcards, puppies, giant hearts, roses with glitter on, and sometimes cards with music. I still write her emails and texts though. My mother’s the only one I send postcards to. The last one on New Year’s Eve. That was for Christmas too. We don’t see much of each other any more but my New Year’s resolution is to go and visit her more often. Because she doesn’t like coming here to me, to the city.

Editorial Reviews

‘This is a wonderfully insightful, frank, exciting and heartbreaking read. Bricks and Mortar is like diving into a Force 10 gale of reality, full of strange voices, terrible events and a vision of neoliberal capitalism that is chillingly accurate.’
— A. L. Kennedy, author of Serious Sweet

‘The point of Im Stein [Bricks and Mortar] is that nothing’s “in stone”: Clemens Meyer’s novel reads like a shifty, corrupted collocation of .docs, lifted off the laptop of a master genre-ist and self-reviser. It’s required reading for fans of the Great Wolfgangs (Hilbig and Koeppen), and anyone interested in casual gunplay, drug use, or sex.’
— Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus

‘A journey to the end of the night for twentieth/ twenty-first century Germany. Meyer reworks Döblin and Céline into a modern epic prose film with endless tracking shots of the gash of urban life, bought flesh and the financial transaction (the business of sex); memory as unspooling corrupted tape; journeys as migrations, as random as history and its splittings. A shimmering cast threatens to fly from the page, leaving only a revenant’s dream – sky, weather, lights-on-nobody-home, buried bodies, night rain. What new prose should be and rarely is; Meyer rewrites the rules to produce a great hallucinatory channel-surfer of a novel.’
— Chris Petit, author of Robinson

‘Meyer’s multifaceted prose, studded with allusions to both high and popular culture, and superbly translated by Katy Derbyshire, is musical and often lyrical, elevating lowbrow punning and porn-speak into literary devices … [Bricks and Mortar] is admirably ambitious and in many places brilliant – a book that not only adapts an arsenal of modernist techniques for the twenty-first century but, more importantly, reveals their enduring poetic potential.’
— Anna Katharina Schaffner, Times Literary Supplement

‘[Bricks and Mortar is a] stylistic tour de force about the sex trade in Germany from just before the demise of the old GDR to the present, as told through a chorus of voices and lucidly mangled musings. The result is a gripping narrative best described as organic.’
— Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

From the Publisher